


Five for Fighting

by Harlanhardway (Target44)



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hockey, Alternate Universe - Sports, BAMF John Blake, Canada, Coffee Shops, Eventual Happy Ending, Excessive Swearing, Explicit Sexual Content, I tried to hold it in, M/M, bad hockey jokes, but the endnotes got excessive again, hockey fights, hockey fights can be kinda violent so be aware of that, soft Bane/Blake, the Canadian/hockey/coffee shop AU I needed in my life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-24
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-11-18 14:45:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11292849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Target44/pseuds/Harlanhardway
Summary: Bane is an NHL enforcer at the top of the sport and John has followed his career since forever.  John is an incredibly enthusiastic, but questionably talented forward for a barely-even-minor league hockey team in rural Ontario.  No way they would ever end up playing together, right?  Right?





	1. The Hat Trick

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deinvati](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deinvati/gifts).



> Trigger Warning: Graphic depictions of hockey fights
> 
> Things to know going in: the NHL is the National Hockey League, it's the best paying, highest level of hockey in the world. A hockey game consists of three 20 min periods, unlimited substitutions are allowed at basically any time, each team gets six men on the ice at once (including the goalie). For most rule infractions (penalties), the player committing the infraction is put in the penalty box for a specific amount of time and play continues with that player's team one man down. Fighting is a big part of North American hockey, unlike European hockey were fighting will get you thrown out of the game and, as a result, isn't really a thing. Certain players called "enforcers," "goons," or "tough guys" are pretty much only on the team to fight. Some people argue that fighting is necessary for the self-policing of the game, it’s a bit of an ongoing debate. Hopefully everything else is made reasonably clear in context ^^;;
> 
> >_>... I may have watched "Slap Shot" and "Goon" a few too many times… and maybe "Youngblood." Don't judge me.
> 
> Special thanks to my awesome beta reader [MargaretKire](http://archiveofourown.org/users/MargaretKire/pseuds/MargaretKire/) ([mothdustmouth](https://mothdustmouth.tumblr.com/) on tumblr)

  
  
John was so mad he could feel his mouth water.  
  
He watched the penalty clock tick down, glancing across the ice at the man in the penalty box, then looking over at Coach Grayson.  He could feel the fire in his own eyes as he stared down his coach.  Coach Grayson met his eyes, "You trying to tell me something Blake?"  
  
"Put me in."  John didn't even blink.  He turned back to watch the penalty box.

_Who do you think you are, motherfucker?  That you can get away with pulling that shit on my team, on my ice._  
  
John Blake played left wing for the Grand Valley Tornados, a middle-of-the-road semi-pro team in the WOAA Senior AA Hockey League.  He had been playing hockey since he was four years old and had always been the kind of player with more heart than skill.  He had decent speed and decent stick skills, but had never been quite good enough to be called a 'play maker,' and, at five foot eleven, was much too small to be considered anything else.  Now he was twenty-eight, only a few years away from being a grandfather in terms of hockey and he could count the number of fights he had been in on one hand.  That number was about to get just a little bit higher.  
  
Looking back up to the penalty clock, his eyes ticked across the scoreboard.  It was the middle of the second period and they were down 2-3, but it wasn't because they were being out-skated, or out-hustled, or outplayed.  John had scored their first goal in the first three minutes of the game and gotten an assist off Drake ten minutes later.  The Tornados weren't anything to write home about, but they played hard, clean, and knew how to create opportunities.  This was AA hockey, for christ's sake.  Nobody was making any money, they were barely one step up from a rec league.  Everybody played hard, sweated buckets, and generally left their blood in their bodies and not on the fucking ice.  
  
The Nottawasaga River Rats had, apparently, not gotten that memo, especially their right winger and John's soon-to-be new best friend, number 74, Mr. E. Nigma.  Nigma was sitting off a four minute penalty for high-sticking, but the Tornados weren't getting anything out of the power play.  They were one man up while Nigma sat in the penalty box, but nothing shakes a team's confidence quite like seeing one of their lead scorers get clubbed in the head by a four foot hockey stick.  This was only the most recent in a series of hard fouls and intimidation tactics.  Even the refs looked nervous, they weren't used to seeing this kind of shit in their league and didn't know how to shut it down.  
  
John watched the penalty clock, forty-five seconds to go.  Coach Grayson leaned over, "You want it?  Alright, you got it.  I want you in for Todd when that clock shows ten seconds."  
  
John nodded.  He was no enforcer, they didn't have one on the team, and if they did, it definitely wouldn't be John.  John barely broke six foot, even in hockey skates, and weighed 165 pounds soaking wet, no matter how much protein he added to his diet.  He wasn't intimidating anyone and had never particularly tried, but fuck this guy if he thought he could get away with pushing John's team around without some fucking consequences.  Fuck him.  
  
_Twelve._  
  
_Eleven._  
  
_Ten_.  
  
Coach Grayson called Todd over to the bench and John jumped the barrier and was out, onto the ice.  
  
_Five._  
  
_Four._  
  
He locked eyes with Nigma through the plexiglass wall of the penalty box.  
  
_Three._  
  
_Two._  
  
_One._  
  
The buzzer sounded as the penalty clock hit zero and the door opened.  Nigma stepped out  and as soon as the box slammed shut behind him, John dropped his gloves.  
  
Nigma was six foot four, six foot seven in skates, and outweighed John by an easy fifty pounds.  The extra few inches of wingspan meant that all he needed to do was get John by the front of the jersey and hold him out at arm's length, then he could wail on John all day long and John wouldn't be able to do a damn thing about it.  John had seen enough fights to know how this worked, so he rushed in first, taking a solid hit right across the forehead, not even trying to dodge, and getting inside Nigma's guard, grabbing him by the collar, and hitting as hard as he could.  
  
He felt his knuckles split as he caught the edge of Nigma's helmet, but didn't stop, just kept pulling Nigma down by the collar and laying into him with everything he had.  If he let up for a second, it would be over.  He could feel his senses go fuzzy as he took a hit to the side of his head, and was striking out blindly as his vision went white, but he kept his arm locked off on Nigma's jerzey, not letting him have the advantage of his height, and delivered hit after hit until his hand was throbbing and his arm was sore and his peripheral vision was fading in and out and all he could think was:  
  
"THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TAKE ON MY TEAM, MOTHERFUCKER!"  
  
And then Nigma was on his knees and John still had him by the collar, but the linesmen had closed in and one of them was pulling him off and the other was standing between him and Nigma and he was being shoved into the penalty box, charged with a major penalty: five minutes for fighting.  
  
~~~~~  
  
Not surprisingly, the refs had taken a much stricter view on fouls after that.  Fighting was not common at the AA level and not to be encouraged.  So, with the game being called a little tighter, and the moral boost from John's fight, the Tornadoes were able to win 5-3 in the third period.  John was riding high on victory, adrenaline and pain endorphins as he left the changing room.  
  
"A god damned Gordie Howe hat trick!  What the fuck, John, you've been holding out!"  
  
John grimaced and shifted his gear back on his shoulder as JC caught up with him, slapping him on the shoulder.  A Gordie Howe hat trick was a goal, an assist, and a fight, so, technically, JC was right, John had just never, personally, expected to get one.  "Yeah, our games aren't normally like that."  
  
"No shit, I do watch your games online sometimes, like the excellent fucking friend I am, but fucking hell dude!  That was epic, we are watching this video as soon as we get back!"  
  
Jonathan Crane, or JC for short, had driven into Grand Valley for a visit and was staying on John's couch for a few days.  They had played junior hockey together back home in Quebec, but while John had continued, eking out an existence in whatever minor league team would take him, JC had stopped playing years ago and instead had started a YouTube channel called, 'Goon Watch.'  It mostly followed the careers of NHL, AAA, and up-and-coming Junior league enforcers, with extra time taken to highlight the especially brutal fights or track long-term rivalries.   If all a person knew of hockey was from watching 'Goon Watch,' they might very well think the point of the game was only peripherally related to the position of the puck.  
  
Grabbing take-out on the way back, they made their way to John's apartment and, after a long shower, a change of clothes, and a chicken sandwich, John collapsed onto the couch.  He let his head fall back against the cushions, holding a bag of frozen peas across his swollen knuckles and against the side of his face while JC fiddled with the TV.  
  
"I knew bringing the camera was a good idea, this is going on the Reel of Champions for sure."  Every season JC compiled a highlight reel of what he considered to be the best fights and biggest hits of the season to use as transitions for his YouTube videos.  He then released the whole thing at the end of the season, to much fanfare.  
  
"Are you sure you want to include an AA fight?  Won't your viewers complain about watered-down content?"  
  
"Dude, Bane would be proud of that fucking fight.  Besides, with the NHL lockout, what else are they gonna watch?  It's fucking January and the NHL is still canceling games. This is 2004 all over again. I bet we don't even get a Stanley Cup this year."  
  
Patrick 'Bane' Banor was an enforcer for the Minnesota Wild.  He was the biggest, baddest heavyweight goon in the NHL and JC and John had been watching him fight since Bane's rookie season fifteen years before.  For a while, the Reel of Champions had been mostly Bane's season highlights with a couple of Junior player hits thrown in for flavor, until John had accused JC of being a fanboy and then efforts had been made to broaden its focus.  Though, if he was being perfectly honest, John was just as much a fan as JC was, though perhaps for slightly different reasons.  
  
He typically avoided looking at other hockey players that way, it made communal showers awkward and was just generally a bad idea, but Bane was safely very far away in the NHL and also undeniably hot.  At the moment of making that comment to JC, John had been feeling particularly bitter about the Rob Ray Rule, which required jerseys to be tied down with fight straps.  Rob Ray had been an NHL enforcer in the 80s and 90s who used to strip out of his jersey and shoulder pads before a fight so his opponent wouldn't have anything to grab onto and John had decided that, had it still been allowed, Bane would definitely have been the type to do the same.  John did not appreciate having been deprived of the view.  
  
He grunted in acknowledgment.  "I'm pretty sure Bane doesn't ice his black eyes with Green Giant frozen peas."  
  
"Naw, I bet he totally does."  JC plopped down next to him.  "Alright, check this out."  
  
Shifting the frozen peas to the side, John squinted his eyes open to look at the screen.  JC had a decent camera and had been doing this for a while, so his footage wasn't actually that big of a departure from the quality of local sports news coverage, it might even have been better.  
  
John watched himself skate up to the penalty box.  The door opened and Nigma came out, took two steps and made to drop his gloves.  Then John was on him.  
  
It was pretty brutal.  John hadn't realized how many hits he had been taking, or just how much bigger Nigma was than him.  He had been playing hockey for a very long time with much bigger guys, and had somewhat forgotten how it looked when he squared off against a heavyweight like that.  
  
Nigma went down and, for a second, he and John were at eye level with each other before the linesmen pulled them apart.  
  
"What'd I tell you?  Epic as fuck!  We're calling that David and Goliath."  JC powered on his laptop and started pulling up his video editing software.  
  
"Really?"  John groused, putting the peas back over his face.  "If you're gonna make this a thing can you at least do me the favor of keeping the fucking biblical symbolism out of it?"  
  
"Alright, no problem, Jack the Giant Killer it is then."  
  
"Where do you even-"  John's protests were interrupted by the sound of his phone going off.  He pulled it out of his pocket and glanced at the caller ID. It was Coach Grayson.  
  
He motioned JC to shut up.  "Hey, Coach."  
  
"Blake, good job today."  
  
"I do my best, Coach."  
  
"I don't want to interrupt your evening, so I'll keep this brief.  You're being loaned out."  
  
"What?"  
  
"The Nighthawks were scouting at the game tonight.  They were looking at number 74 on the River Rats, thought he might make a good tough guy, but they got you instead."  
  
"What?"  The Nighthawks were in the LNAH, the Ligue Nord-Américaine de Hockey, out of Quebec.  It was several orders of magnitude above AA and had the reputation for being the toughest, most brutal hockey league in the world.  
  
"Look, John, it's probably only going to be for one game.  This is a big step up for you, they're playing a whole different game over there and they're not taking you on for your stick skills."  
  
"I'm not exactly an enforcer."  
  
"I know.  I just got off the phone with their coach and he thinks a five foot eleven, first line forward who takes on and takes down a 250 pound heavyweight is exactly the kind of fire his team needs lit under their collective asses, so expect a phone call."  
  
"Thanks, Coach."  
  
John took the phone away from his ear as he heard Coach Grayson hang up.  He stared at it for a second.  "Holy shit."  
  
"What's the deal?"  
  
JC looked up from his laptop, but before John could reply, his phone lit up again.  It was an unknown number with a Quebec area code.  
  
"Hello, this is John Blake."  
  
"John Blake, this is Lucius Fox with the Saint-Georges Nighthawks."  
  
"Hello, sir."  
  
"I saw what you did today, that was some good work.  I believe they call that a Gordie Howe hat trick."  
  
"Yes, sir.  Thank you, sir."  
  
"I want you to come to practice on Monday, seven AM at the Centre Sportif Lacroix-Dutil, and if everything goes well, I'm putting you in the lineup on Friday.  How does that sound to you?"  
  
"Sounds good, Coach."  
  
"Very good, and, son?"  
  
"Yes, Coach?"  
  
"Bring that fire with you."  
  
"Yes, Coach."  
  
John put the phone down and stared at it again, then dropped the bag of peas he was still holding onto the floor, shaking out his hand and wiping the water off on the leg of his sweatpants.  He had forgotten about it and his hand had gone numb.  
  
"Well?  Come on, man, don't leave me hanging?  What happened?"  JC looked at him expectantly.  
  
"I'm being lent to the Nighthawks for a game, in the LNAH."  
  
"Holy motherfucking shit balls!"  JC jumped to his feet and started dancing around the room.  "What'd I tell you?  This is fucking epic!  Epic!"  
  
~~~~~  
  
Grayson had been right, the LNAH was a whole other world.  John had shown up at practice and the team had looked at him like he was a bad joke and then proceeded to ignore him for most of the week.  He didn't blame them.  He hadn't been good enough for the LNAH when he was a in his early twenties and now that he was losing the edge off his speed, he was barely able to keep up with the drills, much less hope to contribute in a fucking game.  Coach Fox hadn't commented.  
  
He had been given a uniform and at seven forty-five on Friday night, found himself warming the bench in his first, and probably only, LNAH game.  It was a spot he did not expect to be leaving at any point in the next hour, but he could see what Coach Grayson had meant about the Nighthawks.  
  
They weren't so much lacking fire as they were being smothered by the wet blanket that was Bruce 'God's Gift To Hockey' Wayne.  Wayne was their star forward.  He had played in the NHL for years and been something of a legend, an all-around player who could both score and deliver a solid hit, until a shoulder injury had brought him back to the minor leagues.  Now he played for the Nighthawks and was vocally not happy about it.  His offensive game had been slipping and his scoring stats since leaving the NHL had been abysmal, so he was mostly on the team as an enforcer, but even at that, he was unreliable.  
  
A couple of weeks ago, their team captain, Jim Gordon, had been put hard into the boards, sustaining an injury that had put him out of the game.  There had been no retribution, not from Wayne and not from anybody else.  That had been the beginning of a losing streak for the Nighthawks that remained, as of yet, unbroken.  They were playing the Cornwall River Kings today and Gordon was back in for the first time since the injury and, though it was a different team, this was a rough league and the Kings had their own goon squad.  
  
_BAM!_  
  
John flinched as Gordon was hit hard into the boards.  The penalty was called and the Nighthawks rotated to their power play line.  Gordon was obviously shaken.  The clock ticked down and Wayne was rotated in.  The penalty clock ran out.  Wayne did nothing.  
  
Then Gordon went back in with the shift change.  
  
_BAM!_  
  
Gordon was caught in a cross-check as he chased after a long pass.  The penalty was called, the Nighthawks took the power play, the clock ran out, Wayne was put in, and again, nothing happened.  
  
The first period ended with the score at 0-1 against.  Three minutes into the second period, the gap widened to 0-2.  The team looked already defeated, they weren't even communicating anymore, Gordon had gone quiet on the ice.  
  
_BAM!_  
  
It was a clean hit this time, but solid.  John grit his teeth in sympathy, Jim Gordon would be feeling that when he tried to get out of bed in the morning.  
  
"Blake!"  
  
John looked up.  "Yes, Coach?"  
  
"You're going in for Gordon!"  
  
Coach Fox made the signal and John was off the bench and on the ice as soon as Gordon was close.  Fuck, but this game was fast.  The puck was passed to Dent, in center, and John tried to get open, make himself useful, pretend he knew what the fuck he was doing out here.  
  
_BAM!_  
  
Number 43, Sean "The Bouncer" Durham caught Dent with a check from behind and the Nighthawks lost the puck.  There was no call.  John glanced over at Wayne as they rushed back on defense.  Wayne did nothing.  
  
_What the fucking fuck?_  
  
Now Dent was getting harassed.  As the minutes ticked by, the score held at 0-2 but they were on the defense more often than not.  John was scrambling like a madman to hold his own and still felt like he was barely justifying his existence on the ice.  
  
_This is your ice.  Your ice, your puck, your team.  Claim it._  
  
Self-doubt never got anyone anywhere.  
  
Then, there it was!  Wayne blocked a pass and shot the puck down the ice, out of their endzone.  It flew past the center line with Dent after it and Durham hot on his tail.  The end zone was wide open.  
  
_BAM!_  
  
Dent hit the boards hard, Durham slamming into him from the side.  A penalty was called, but John was already down the ice with his gloves off before he could think twice about it.  
  
Durham was ready for him, had been waiting for this to happen, though definitely not from John.  He caught John's jersey, pulling it tight around the armpit and stopping his swing.

_CRUNCH!_  
  
John felt his nose break and tasted copper as blood poured down the back of his throat.  Durham had a good half foot on him and he had to tilt his head up to look at him.  He tried to pull his arm free, but it was caught in his jersey.  
  
_BAM!_  
  
He caught another hard hit to the head.  
  
His vision was a blur of white spots and dark spots and red.  He couldn't get air in through his nose and blood was running down into his eyes from a cut somewhere on his forehead.  He tried to get a hit in, to stay upright, to regain some control, but all he could concentrate on was the buzzing in his ears and the throbbing behind his eyes as he got hit and hit and hit.  
  
_Bane wouldn't put up with this shit._  
  
He threw a wild punch, but couldn't make contact.  
  
_Fuck this guy.  This is your ice.  This is your ice and your team and nobody fucks with them and gets away with it.  Don't you dare._  
  
He felt his knees start to buckle.  
  
_Don't you dare go down without letting them know._  
  
In a final burst of determination, he dropped low, dipping his shoulders low on Durham's center of gravity, throwing him off balance, and then slamming him forward, right into the boards.  It dazed Durham for a second, just long enough for John to get his arm free and catch him with a haymaker to the jaw, before Durham had him by the jersey again and went back to pounding the ever-living-shit out of John's face.  
  
The refs broke it up before John actually went down, but it was a near thing.  
  
~~~~~  
  
Durham stayed out for the rest of the game.  It turned out that John's haymaker had broken his jaw and Durham had to be sent to the hospital to have it wired shut, but that wasn't something John found out until much later, when he read about it in the sports pages the next day.  
  
After his five minute penalty was up, John had been allowed to finish out the last few minutes of the second period and he could feel a palpable difference on the ice.  The Nightwings were playing hard, like they actually wanted to win, and they were looking to him as someone who could maybe even contribute.  
  
As he skated back towards the exit to the locker room at the end of the period, Wayne caught his eye, narrowing his gaze and nodding.  John just looked back at him.  He would have raised an eyebrow, but his entire face hurt at this point and it didn't feel worth it.  
  
_Nod all you like, tough guy_ , he thought, _how about you defend your fucking team every once in awhile so I don't have to._  
  
Then, miracle of miracles, in the third period, Wayne kind of did.  There were no more fights, but Wayne took two penalties and made his presence very known, like a shadow over Jim Gordon's shoulder just waiting for somebody to give it a try.  0-2 became 1-2, became 2-2 and they almost went into overtime but Harvey Dent pulled out a last-second goal with an assist from Wayne and, with that, the Nighthawks had their first victory since the new year.  
  
Coach Fox pulled John aside as he came out of the dressing room.  He had his gear bag slung over his shoulder and his nose was throbbing from being recently re-set.  
  
"Blake."  
  
"Yes, Coach?"  
  
"Where have you been staying since being in town?"  
  
"Travelodge sir, just down the road."  
  
"That place is shit, here."  He handed John a card.  "Call that number, ask for Barbara.  Tell her I sent you and you'll be needing accommodations until April."  
  
"Until April, coach?"  
  
"I want you for the rest of the season, unless you'd rather go back to Ontario and play stick-and-puck in AA some more."  
  
"Yes, coach.  I mean, no coach.  I mean," he slipped the card into his pocket and tried to smile around the swelling in his face, "I'll call the number."  
  
"Keep it up Blake, welcome on board."  Coach Fox held his hand out for John to shake.  
  
"Thanks, Coach, will do."  
  
~~~~~  
  
John made it back to the Travelodge, falling back onto his bed with a package of frozen peas pressed against his face.  He had a cooler full of them, enough to last until he could get himself sorted with a proper apartment that included a refrigerator and freezer, and planned on spending the rest of the evening watching HBO and eating take-out Chinese.  He would have preferred a burger, but he didn't trust his ability to open his mouth wide enough at the moment.  
  
His phone rang.  
  
He didn't bother looking at the caller ID, just answered, the frozen peas still draped over his face.  "Hello."  
  
"Jack the mother-fucking Giant Killer!"  
  
"Ugh, could you come up with a more annoying epithet?  I take it you watched the game then?"  It was JC.  He had wanted to come out to Saint-Georges for the game, but after taking time off to visit Grand Valley the week before, had needed to stay in Quebec for work.  
  
"Fuck you, did I watch the game?  The whole province of Quebec watched that fucking game!  You're a legend, man!  You have to stop through on your way back and do an interview for the channel!"  
  
"Yeah, that's not gonna happen."  
  
"What?  Why?  Okay, okay, playing hard to get with your new celebrity status, I get it.  What's it gonna take?  A little wining and dining?  A little VIP treatment?"  
  
"I can pay for my own corndog and Kokanee, thanks for asking though.  That's not it, I'm not headed home just now."  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"They want me for the rest of the season."  
  
"FUCK OFF!!  Fuck right the fuck off!  Don't you dare mess with me right now, John, I take this shit very seriously and I know where you keep your prized collection of memorial coffee mugs .  I will not stay my hand if you are fucking with me!"  
  
"I do not have a prized collection of memorial coffee mugs."  
  
"Keep telling yourself that, I've been to your place, John, you can't hide from me.  Now cut the crap."  
  
"Just because- ugh, fine, whatever.  I'm not fucking with you though, they want me for the season."  
  
"Holy shit, that's amazing!  Do you realize what this means?  You are now playing in the same league with, will soon be sharing the ice, maybe even facing off against THE Patrick 'Bane' Banor!"  
  
"What?  No I'm fucking not, are you high?"  
  
"No, John, the Assassins just announced Bane joined their lineup while the NHL is in lockout!  You are gonna be playing against Bane, holy shit, this is amazing!"  
  
"Fuck."  
  
"Right?  This is gonna be the most epic hockey season on record, and I thought the lockout had fucked us for a good Reel of Champions, but fucking hell!"  
  
John was starting to be able to feel his face again.  He switched to a fresh package of peas.  
  
"Fucking hell is right."

_How did this even happen?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did not extensively research the rules of trading in minor league hockey, but I'm pretty sure things like this can happen if a player is a free agent. But then, maybe not? Just go with me on this, okay?
> 
> In case it was unclear: a hat trick is when you have three positive contributions to a game (it's kinda a pan-team concept and can mean a lot of different things). A Gordie Howe hat trick is a goal, an assist, and a fight, all in the same hockey game. It gets its name from Gordie Howe, a.k.a. "Mr. Hockey." He's considered one of the most complete (well-rounded) players to have ever played.
> 
> The NHL has had a couple of lockouts over labor disputes. The 2004-05 season was totally canceled because of it and the 2012-13 season was much abbreviated. During this time, some NHL players did play in the LNAH, so this is part is totally feasible.


	2. Rule 46

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enter: Bane.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning: graphic descriptions of hockey fights
> 
> Also, I have the best beta reader in the whole world!!! Go check out [MargaretKire](http://archiveofourown.org/users/MargaretKire/pseuds/MargaretKire/) ([mothdustmouth](https://mothdustmouth.tumblr.com/) on tumblr) she is the greatest :)))))

  
  
John raced down the ice.  
  
He wasn't the fastest skater known to mankind, but goddamnit if he wouldn't chase down every puck that came down his side like a fucking dog.  The opposition was getting sloppy.  They had a power play, but they were tired, so, instead of trying to score, they were trying to slow the game down and coast on their one man advantage.  
  
John was tired too.  His lungs hurt.  His legs hurt.  He could feel the lactic acid building up in his thighs, his calves, his shoulders.  His stick felt like a lead weight in his hand, but he still kept pressuring the offense, making them earn every pass.  
  
_Don't let up.  If you can't win the sprint, make everyone else run a marathon.  Don't let up._  
  
He threw his stick out to block a pass and missed, but the pass didn't connect.  It was just sloppy enough, just badly positioned enough, that Bruce was able to intercept it and take off towards their attacking zone.  The adrenaline hit John's bloodstream and suddenly he didn't feel tired anymore.  These were the opportunities that made all the training worthwhile.  They had the puck and about five seconds to do something with it before the defense set up.  
  
Bruce wasn't known for his speed either and was caught by his defenseman before he reached the goal, so he whipped around the back of the crease instead, hoping for a second shot.  A second defenseman came in from the other side, trapping him behind the goal.  The opposition had woken up in a hurry and raced back on defense after Bruce's breakaway interception.  No one liked being scored on when they had a one-man advantage, not only was it embarrassing, but it was the kind of thing that made for real long practices later on.  
  
Bruce kicked the puck out to John and John barely caught it, his defender hot on his hip.  They were playing three on four, this was their last decent chance for a goal before the defense settled and pressed their advantage.   John had already been pushed past the mouth of the goal, out of shooting range.  He glanced back over his shoulder, towards the goalie, then, without thinking, flipped his stick around, pushed the puck back between his legs and flicked it into the top left corner of the net.  
  
Coach Fox called the goal just as Damian Ghul slammed into him from behind, pulling him into a great big bear hug.  "Well, what do you know, little Sparkie's a fucking sniper!"  
  
John groaned internally, he hated that nickname.  Damian was barely eighteen and both incredibly talented and incredibly obnoxious.  He was easily the fastest skater and best shot on the team, but tended to get knocked around like a pinball on the ice, to the point where, most of the time, he was functionally useless to anyone.  That probably didn't help with the attitude problem.  John rolled his eyes.  "Keep up the lazy passing and we're gonna be running lines until the end of time, Shitstick."  
  
"Aw, Sparkie, I know getting down the ice must feel like it takes forever, but that's really only because of how slow you are."  
  
The whistle blew and they lined out to run the drill again, relieving John of any need for a response.  The puck dropped and they were off.  Damian's team scored almost immediately.  Being thoroughly embarrassed seemed to have done wonders to motivate the Nighthawk's power play line.  They ran the drill a few more times before Coach Fox ordered a cool-down and released them back to the locker rooms.  
  
Coach Fox was a good coach and Jim Gordon was a good team captain.  Their prefered style of leadership was gentle guidance and example and their prefered style of hockey was clean, pure and relied on self-policing and good sportsmanship.  It didn't involve fights or fouls or intimidation and was probably the kind of hockey played at some upper-class universities.  Had the Nighthawks been playing college hockey, they probably would have done quite well.  Unfortunately, they played in the LNAH, where a team either learned to claim the ice or got swept off it, and they tended to get swept off it.  It was fucking depressing.  
  
John stripped out of his practice jersey and shoulder pads, then rolled down his hockey socks so he could pull off his knee and shin guards and unlace his skates.  He sighed as he slipped out of them and into his regular shoes.  As much as he loved hockey, and as comfortable as his hockey skates were, there was something truly wonderful about being able to kick them off at the end of a long practice.  Flexing his ankles and wiggling his toes, he leaned back against the locker room wall.  
  
There was the usual banter going on around him: who had banged the new girl working the rental counter during free skate, the latest gossip about the state of the NHL lockout, and of course, the obligatory bad hockey jokes that everyone had already heard about a million and a half times.  They were scheduled to play the best team in the league the very next evening, but no one seemed too inclined to talk about it.  
  
"Oi, Harvey, why do Canadians always fuck doggie style?"  Damian was also American, the only reason he played in the LNAH was because of the year he had spent in Quebec Junior Hockey before he got pulled up.  
  
"So they can both watch the hockey game!"  Damian laughed at his own lame joke as everyone else tried not to cringe.  It got a half-smile out of John.  He didn't really think it was funny, but was feeling a bit generous.  
  
Life really wasn't so bad.  John was playing in the LNAH and for a pretty damn good team.  Most of his complaints were caused by the fact that the Nighthawks had a terrible game strategy and the absolute wrong philosophy for the league they were in.  They weren't actually as shit as their record suggested and it was damn frustrating.  But it wasn't really Damian's fault that his team didn't adequately protect him and, besides, he was basically a kid.  John probably would have laughed at that stupid joke too if he were eighteen.  
  
"Hey, Damian."  
  
Damian turned and John tried to ignore his incredibly irritating smile.  
  
_Ugh, teenagers.  I just don't see the appeal._  
  
"What makes Wayne Gretzky better than Jesus?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"When Wayne Gretzky walks on water, he doesn't get nailed to the boards."  
  
Damian laughed, seeming genuinely surprised.  "That was a pretty good one, old man, I'll give you that.  That one was pretty good."  
  
A few minutes later, Jim Gordon pulled them in for a final pep talk before everyone headed home for the evening.  It should have been a rousing speech about teamwork, drive and believing in themselves, but to John's ears it just kinda sounded like Gordon thought they were about to play in the Olympics or something.  He nodded along with the rest of the team and tried not to roll his eyes as he shouldered his bag and walked out.  
  
~~~~~  
  
John woke up early the next morning and went for a run.  He always went for a run on game days, it kept him lose.  But all their games had been away since the first one he played with the Nighthawks, three weeks before, so this was his first game-day jog in his own neighborhood.  
  
He had been set up with a shitty one-room apartment in Saint-Joseph-de-Beauce in fairly short order and was not entirely unhappy with it.  That had not been the case initially.  Saint-Georges, the home of the Nighthawks, was a pretty small town and Saint-Joseph-de-Beauce was the even smaller town about twenty minutes away.  Finding out that it was going to take him half an hour to get to the practice rink everyday, more often than not twice a day, did not endear him to the place, but then he had found the Donut Nook.  
  
The Donut Nook was an indescribable local gem.  It was open from six in the morning until three in the afternoon and sold drip coffee, fresh donuts and that was it.  Technically, instant hot chocolate and orange juice were also both on the menu, but they didn't have an espresso machine and if anyone wanted soy milk, they were welcome to bring it themselves.  Their target demographic seemed to be stoic and flannel-wearing and the whole place smelled like burnt coffee and maple bars.  It was basically heaven.  
  
Normally, John would come in after morning practice, sometime around eleven, to decompress over a little coffee and simple carbs, but today was a game day.  He went for his run, did some stretching, jumped in the shower, then walked over with his wet hair tucked up under his hat and the collar of his jacket pulled up around his neck.  
  
The bell over the door rang as he came in.  "Hey, John, you're here early!  Same as usual?"  the woman behind the counter greeted him.  
  
"Yeah, thanks.  Game day today so no morning practice."  John strolled over to the counter, surveying the room as she grabbed him his maple bar and filled his coffee, then pulled up short.  
  
John knew Bane played for the Assassins and that the Assassins were in Thetford Mines and that Thetford Mines was only about half an hour away from Saint-Joseph-de-Beauce in the opposite direction of Saint-Georges and that clearly the Donut Nook was the type of place people would flock to from miles around if it wasn't such a well-kept local secret, but it was still a shock to see him there.  It felt a bit like running into the Prime Minister at the dentist's office, if the Prime Minister was an incredibly hot NHL hockey player and the dentist's officer was his favorite donut shop.  
  
For a while now, especially since finding out they would be playing against each other at some point, John had been holding onto the vague hope that Bane would turn out to be somewhat unattractive in real life.  Having a crush on a fellow player was embarrassing, inconvenient and caused John's private and professional lives to cross in ways that he did not appreciate.  Besides, Bane was an enforcer, would it really be too much to ask for him to be a roided-out Sylvester Stallone-looking motherfucker in real life?  
  
Yes, apparently it would be.  
  
Bane was sitting at the coffee bar, a work jacket, lined with what looked like natural fleece, lying on the counter next to him, calmly looking through the morning paper like it was something he did every day.  He was just as big and broad as he looked on TV, his dark green henley fit him snugly across the shoulders, but it looked soft, like maybe he wore it often.  His face was clean-shaven, young-looking, but, even from the side, John could still make out the scar down his right cheek from where he had caught a puck to the face only a few seasons before.  His blond hair was cut short and lay flat against his head, reminding John of how he looked in post-game interviews, just after taking off his helmet.  He had probably been wearing a hat earlier.  His eyes were light, maybe green, maybe blue, and his lips were full.  In short, it was every terrible, gay Canadian boy fantasy John had ever guiltily indulged in, come to life.  
  
_Fuck._  
  
This was no way to be thinking about a fellow player.  
  
_Get it together, you'll be playing against this guy tonight.  Don't be a fucking weirdo, introduce yourself._  
  
Bane was in the NHL, he probably got recognized all the time.  
  
_Best just get this over with and move on._  
  
John walked over.  "Hi, you play with the Assassins, right?  I'm John Blake, just started with the Nighthawks."  
  
Barely even turning his head in acknowledgment, Bane looked over at him coolly.  "The enforcer."  
  
His voice was even worse in real life.  It rumbled.  John could feel it roll across his ribcage like a bass beat.  It was fucking unfair.  
  
"Uh, yeah, I guess."  
  
Bane made a dismissive noise in the back of his throat, and turned his attention back to his coffee.  
  
"Well, maybe not a full-fledged enforcer, more of a stand-in, really.  But, you know, if no one else is gonna do it then: needs must and all that."  John laughed awkwardly.

 _Wow, could I be anymore uncool right now?_  
  
John looked down at Bane's hands where they were wrapped around his coffee mug.  They were big hands, the knuckles pushed back and covered over with scars on top of scars.  Bane was only thirty-three, but his hands looked much older.  John had never thought about that before, how quickly an enforcer's hands must age.  
  
He brought his eyes back up.  Bane was looking over at him again.  
  
"Fly away, Baby Bird, back home to the AAs before you get yourself killed."  
  
For half a second, John felt about two inches high, and then he reminded himself that the asshole in front of him was halfway through eating an apple fritter.  John's grandpa ate apple fritters.  Bane may very well have been God's actual gift to hockey (unlike Bruce Wayne), but John refused to be talked-down-to by anyone eating a fucking apple fritter.  In fact, he refused to be talked down to as a general rule, the apple fritter just made him feel that much more justified in his disdain for the dipstick attitude currently being thrown at him.  
  
"I am home," he replied.  
  
Then he immediately felt stupid again, because Saint-Georges wasn't really his home.  His home was Quebec and, while Saint-Georges was in the province of Quebec, everyone who played in the LNAH was from somewhere in the province of Quebec, or had at least played Junior Hockey there, it was part of the league requirements.  Bane, he knew for a fact, was from Inukjuak, which was so far out in bumfuck Quebec, it was practically Newfoundland.  Bane was about as Canadian as they come without being an actual member of the First Nations.  
  
The man in question had, meanwhile, gone back to his coffee and apple fritter without further acknowledging John, John's response, or John's post-response existential crisis.    
  
_What a dick._  
  
John chose to call it a draw.  He got his maple bar and coffee to go and walked back out the door.  He would seen Bane again soon enough.  
  
~~~~~  
  
Nine hours later, John was sitting on the bench at the Centre Sportif Lacroix-Dutil, watching the Assassins wipe the ice with his team.  It was barely the beginning of the second period and the Nighthawks were already down two nothing.  Gordon's fancy passing plays and elegant, weaving offense were being shut down like the Red Army against the Broad Street Bullies.  Coach Fox had put Wayne in fairly quickly, hoping to calm things down, but Bane was an NHL enforcer and very good at his job.  Within a minute of Wayne stepping out onto the ice, Bane had him up against the boards.  It hadn't even looked like that hard of a hit to John, but getting a love-tap from Bane was probably a like getting in a fender-bender with a mack truck.  It was enough to have Bruce running scared and the rest of the team visibly nervous on the ice.  Their confidence was gone and morale was eroding rapidly.  
  
John was pissed off.  
  
John loved hockey.  He loved the pace, the strategy, the skill of it all.  A good hockey player could reach speeds faster than twenty miles per hour and the puck could fly across the ice at well over one hundred.  A good hockey player could not afford to react, only to anticipate.  A good hockey player played at the very edge of their ability one hundred percent of the time.  This was what made playing the game worthwhile and rewarding, but this was also why intimidation worked so well.  An unexpected check from behind at those kind of speeds could end a person's career.  
  
It could happen to anyone and it wasn’t even that uncommon.  Keith Primeau, NHL, retired early: post-concussion syndrome.  Nick Kypreos, NHL, retired early: post-concussion syndrome.  Scott Stevens, NHL, retired early: post-concussion syndrome.  Paul Kariya, NHL, retired early: post-concussion syndrome.  Pat LaFontaine, NHL, retired early: post-concussion syndrome.  Cam Neely, NHL, retired early: irreparable knee injury.  Al MacInnis, NHL, retired early: detached his retina, and that was just the tip of the iceberg.  The list went on and on and the worst part was, the brutality that had come to be so accepted, and even expected, wasn't even that integral to the game.  
  
When the 1976 Soviet Red Army Team, arguably one of the best teams ever in the history of hockey, came to play in an exhibition match against the Philadelphia Flyers, a.k.a. the Broad Street Bullies, the original NHL goon-squad, they were so taken aback by the level of dangerous play being allowed, that they actually walked off the ice in protest.  The Red Army Team, the most dominant team in the history of any international sport ever, walked off the fucking ice because it was dangerous enough not to be fucking worth it.  Not that anyone in America gave a shit what a Russian had to say about anything.  
  
John might have been more than just a little pissed off.  
  
The Assassins scored again and everyone skated back to center ice for the faceoff.  Harvey Dent played center.  He was good at faceoffs.  That was why he always played center even though Gordon led the offense.  
  
The puck dropped and Harvey won control.  He passed off to Gordon, weaving behind and stripping himself of his defender, then shooting out left and getting the pass back just before crossing the blue line.  
  
_BAM!_  
  
Bane slammed into him head-on.  He managed to dump the puck off to Damian, but hit his knees hard and was slow to get back up.  
  
Damian took the puck into the Nighthawk's attacking zone, but with Harvey still on his knees, they were effectively one player down.  The Assassins' left defenseman, David Cain, pressed Damian into making a stupid pass to Gordon, that was picked up by Slade Wilson, at center, and shot down the ice.  
  
"Blake!  Go in for Dent!"  
  
Coach Fox signaled the substitution as the puck crossed the blue line into the Nighthawk's defending zone.  The linesman raised his arm.  It hit the boards and bounced back.  Harvey limped towards the bench.  When Harvey got close enough, John jumped over the barrier, his skates hitting the ice just as Wayne made it back on defense.  
  
_BAM!_  
  
Wayne got steam-rolled with a hard check from Bane, but he had already made contact with the puck.  The ref called icing.  
  
_Fuck._  
  
Play stopped and linesman brought the puck down to the faceoff dot in the Nighthawks' attacking zone.  John set up opposite Assassin's center.  
  
_You can do this, fuck this guy is huge.  No, fuck that, you can do this._  
  
The linesman dropped the puck.  John lost the faceoff to Wilson, who was then immediately stripped of the puck by Damian.  
  
Damian was off like a shot.  
  
_BAM!_  
  
Clipped from behind by Bane, Damian hit the ice hard.  Assassins' left defenseman, Cain, grabbed the free puck.  No foul was called.  
  
Damian had already pulled himself off the ice and was racing down to get back on defense, but John didn't follow.  He squared off in front of Bane.  
  
Bane looked down at John.  He didn't say anything, but John could feel the question looming between them anyway: Are you sure you want to do this, Baby Bird?  
  
_Go fuck yourself, asshole._  
  
John dropped his gloves.  
  
Before he knew what was happening, Bane was on him.  Fuck, that guy was fast when he wanted to be.  Bane had John by the collar and his first punch caught John in the solar plexus like a twenty-pound dead blow.  His head snapped back and and he couldn't breath.  
  
He couldn't breath and he couldn't think.  His head snapped back again and he lost his helmet.  His whole body bucked as Bane fist pounded into his ribs and he felt something crack.  He was about ten seconds away from choking on his mouthguard.  
  
_Fuck this._  
  
John locked onto the arm that was holding him in place, clawing his way up to grab at Bane's shoulder-pads as he took hit after hit to his left side.  
  
_Fuck this._  
  
He stopped trying to breathe, biting down on the hard plastic of his mouthguard and sucking it against his teeth as he braced himself for the next hit, pulling himself into it and lashing out with his right in what felt like the most telegraphed Hail Mary swing in the history of hockey.  
  
_Jesus, Mary and Joseph._  
  
He felt the impact reverberate down his arm as he made contact.  
  
Then Bane caught him in the face with right hook and the next thing he knew he was being helped off the ice by one of the linesmen.  
  
Everything felt fuzzy and disjointed.  He couldn't feel the left side of his face.  It hurt to breathe.  They weren't taking him to the penalty box.  They wanted him to lie down.  No, he wouldn't be going back in.  Yes, they'd keep him updated on the score.  They wanted him to lie down.  The paramedics were here.  They wanted him to lie down.  
  
~~~~~  
  
Six hours later, John was back at his apartment with JC, lying on his ugly brown, twenty dollar, Craigslist couch and half out of his mind with painkillers.  He hated pain killers.  He had heard too many horror stories about opiate addiction to be comfortable with the idea of ever actually filling all the refills on his prescription, but with three cracked ribs and a cheekbone so badly broken it was now held together with screws, he figured he was somewhat allowed, at least for today.  
  
JC had come to Saint-Georges for the game in anticipation of what he dubbed The Clash of the Titans, meaning the meeting of Bane and Bruce Wayne and, while he hadn't gotten what he had been hoping for, he most certainly had not been disappointed.  
  
"Fuck, I can't believe you did that."  After getting over his initial concern for John's general state of well-being, about five minutes after picking him up from the hospital, JC was having a much harder time moving on from 'shock and awe.'  
  
"Not exactly Reel of Champions material though, was it?"  John repositioned himself, trying to find an orientation that didn't press against his ribs.  
  
JC looked at him like he was crazy.  "Are you shitting me?  That was, like, the motherfucking 300 of hockey games."  He lept to his feet, pacing and gesticulating wildly.  "They were all: trying to tell you what's what and you just, Leonidas-style, walked, up to the biggest baddest motherfucker out there, fucking Bane, and went: THIS IS SPARTA!"  
  
He kicked the air dramatically and John rolled his eyes.  
  
"Thank you for the vote of confidence, but I highly doubt anyone else sees it that way."  
  
"I swear to God, I'm not sucking your dick right now."  
  
"I appreciate you clearing that up, because, to be honest, I'm so doped up right now I don't think I'd notice if you were."  
  
"You wanna see the tape?"  
  
John sighed, he'd probably have to see it at some point anyway.  "Sure."  
  
JC cheered, then dropped his hands abruptly, his eyes darting back and forth a little uncertainly.  "I mean, no pressure or anything.  I don't want to, like, give you some PTSD flashback, or something."  
  
John leveled a glare at him.  "You weren't nearly so concerned about my feelings when you posted that video to your channel of me getting punched in the nuts in the ninth grade.  If anything was going to give me PTSD flashbacks, it would have been that."  
  
"True."  JC's expression turned wistful for a moment.  "That was an epic clip, though, wasn't it?"  He turned back to his computer, downloading the video file from his camera and hooking it up the television.  
  
The first period went pretty much as John remembered, with the Nighthawks getting trounced, barely holding the Assassins back at zero to two.  Then the second period started.  Six minutes in, the Assassins scored.  Harvey won the faceoff at center ice, went down, but managed to pass the puck off to Damian, who tried to pass to Gordon.  It was intercepted and shot down the ice into the opposite end zone.  John was subbed in.  Wayne made contact with the puck.  Icing was called.  He lost the faceoff against Wilson, then Damian stripped the puck off Wilson and got checked from behind, losing the puck back to the Assassins while John turned to face Bane.  
  
It wasn't a very interesting fight, just John getting pummeled like a ragdoll by the best enforcer in the NHL, and not even in the face.  That was probably for the best.  He'd probably have been dead if Bane had been hitting him in the face that whole time.  Then John's helmet came off and he managed to pull himself somewhat upright and catch Bane with wild swing, breaking open a big cut over Bane's left eye before Bane swung back in retaliation, thoroughly cleaning his clock and ending the fight.  
  
"Hey, give me the controls."  
  
JC wordlessly passed his laptop over to John on the couch and John played the clip back, slowing it down.  
  
Bane's fist looked huge as it impacted his face and John could see, even from the awkward, three-quarter view camera angle, the second he must have passed out.  By all rights, he should have dropped like a sack of potatoes.  His helmet had come off and he had passed out.  He should have hit the ice, his head slamming into it like a ripe watermelon.  That, right there, should have been, at the very least, a career-ending concussion.  
  
But he hadn't and it wasn't.  
  
The video continued at one-tenth normal speed and John watched, frame by frame, as Bane's grip tightened on his jersey, Bane's other hand coming up, the hand that had just punched him in the fucking face, coming up and cradling the back of his head.  Then the linesmen were there, tearing them apart and John watched himself almost collapse as Bane let go of him.  But one lineman grabbed his shoulder as he started to go down and he must have come to as well because he seemed to catch himself and was able to teeter off the ice.  
  
"See what I mean?"  
  
"He caught me."  John was tempted to watch it again.  
  
"What?"  JC gave him a weird look, taking his computer back and resetting the playback options to normal speed.  "You are super high.  But, no, check this out."  He paused over a close-up of Bane's face in the penalty box.  He was bleeding heavily from an ugly gash bisecting his left eyebrow.  "They pulled him out of the game as soon as his penalty was up.  No one's saying why, but I bet you game him a concussion or something and you just know that's gonna scar.  You gave BANE a  motherfucking scar!"  
  
"Bane rearranged my motherfucking face."  
  
JC waved him off.  "Okay, okay, but you should have seen what your team did after they took you off to the hospital."  
  
"You mean other than lose?"  
  
"They rallied around you, man!  You should have seen it!  Bruce got into three fights!  Three!  He hasn't fought that much since he left the NHL!  They kicked him out of the game half-way through the third period!  And Damian!  I thought that kid was a pushover, but he started throwing elbows like it was a fucking day job!  He tripped that scary ass-looking defender David Cain and I wasn't close enough to hear, but I'm pretty sure he followed it up with something insulting about his mother because you should have seen the way Cain went after him after that, but then Bruce was there with his gloves off, that was his second fight and," JC had worked himself into a bit of a frenzy, "I can't even, just!  Watch the video!  I swear to God, this was just -- !"  He seemed to be at a loss for words and resorted to just shaking his hands at the television screen as if that would explain everything and, in the end, it kind of did.  
  
The Nighthawks lost by two points.  The game didn't go into overtime and it wasn't even particularly close, but JC was right.  Bruce alone clocked over twenty minutes of penalty time before being automatically removed from play following his third fight and when Harvey was put back into play at the beginning of the third period, John almost choked on his water.  Harvey by-the-books, fighting-is-an-insult-to-the-sport Dent won the faceoff, got hit with a vicious cross-check and then threw his gloves down and started what John was fairly certain was the first fight of his entire hockey career.  
  
~~~~~  
  
Despite his own better judgement, John dragged himself to practice the next morning, suiting up with the rest of the team, promptly, at seven-thirty.  He had been put on concussion watch for the next week and probably could have gotten out of going, but fuck that.  If everyone else could make it to practice on time, he could too.  
  
Mid-way through the first warm-up, he was already regretting his decision.  It hurt.  It hurt a lot.  Just to breathe, nevermind his face.  But then they started weaving patterns and Damian, the smart-mouthed asshole who always gave John shit for being slightly slower and seemed to enjoy making him look stupid, sent John the most beautiful, crisp, surgically precise, leading pass he had ever had the privilege to receive, calling, "All yours, Killer," as he wove in, seamlessly, behind him.  
  
If felt fucking amazing.  
  
And then it hurt again for another hour and fourty five minutes.  
  
But John felt it had been worth it, if only for that one pass, and by eleven o'clock, he was walking into the Donut Nook feeling like no one in the history of the world had ever been more deserving of a donut.  He collected his coffee and maple bar and selected his favorite seat at the bar, then almost fell off his barstool again when, ten minutes later, Bane walked in, wiping his feet on the doormat, pulling off his hat and scrubbing one hand over his hair in an absolutely-one-hundred-percent-not-endearing way.  He had a nasty black eye and a couple butterfly bandages were holding his eyebrow together.  It made John feel slightly better about the mound of surgical gauze taped to his own cheek.  
  
They locked eyes for a moment as Bane looked up.  Then he glanced away again and continued towards the counter to order a coffee and an apple fritter, before making his way to his own spot at the bar.  As he passed John, he knocked twice on the counter in front of him, like some sort of bizarre, old-world acknowledgment.  
  
John stared at him as he settled into a seat six stools away, at the other end of the room.  He could feel the ache in his ribs as he twisted to look and his face hurt.  The stitches pulled at the muscles in his face and the soreness was constant, all the way down to the bone.  
  
_Fuck it, what's he gonna do, hit me again?_  
  
"Hey, Bane!"  
  
Bane turned.  His expression remained impassive, but looked as though he could very possibly be on the cusp of raising an eyebrow.  
  
"Why did the Minnesota Wild enforcer have to retire early?"  
  
Bane raised an eyebrow.  
  
"Because he went ice fishing and got run over by the zamboni."  
  
The other eyebrow went up.  
  
John smiled.  It came out a bit lop-sided so he flashed a thumbs up as well, just to be on the safe side, then went back to his coffee and maple bar.  Bane was kind of a weirdo, but being paid to beat people up on national television would probably have that effect on anyone.  John had decided that he was kind of alright with it and, since Bane had already caved John's face in on local television, and they seemed to share a favorite donut shop, John had also decided that this entitled him to be somewhat of a weirdo right back.  It was probably in the rules or something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rule 46 of the NHL rulebook governs fighting. It's a bit ridiculous if you get a chance to read it, especially considering that the NHL officially does not condone fighting. This seems kind of contradictory. If the NHL actually wanted to get rid of fighting, there wouldn't be so many specific rules surrounding when/where it will get you tossed out of the game entirely versus when/where it only get you a five minute penalty.
> 
> Damian Ghul is obviously a reference to Damian al Ghul/Wayne but he's not Bruce's son in this story 'cause that would be kinda weird. Though, I guess I make Damian eighteen and Bruce in his late thirties, so it wouldn't be that implausible, but would make for some fucking strange team dynamics. End decision: I'm going with them not being related.
> 
> Icing is basically when the puck is shot by the defending team from their defending zone all the way to the other side of the ice. If they do this and the opposing team makes contact with the puck first, icing is called. Play is stopped and there is a faceoff in the defending team's defending zone (basically back where everything started). If they shoot the puck all the way down the ice, but are able to make contact with the puck first, then everything’s fine and the game continues. This rule is basically to keep the defending team from constantly kicking the puck to the other side of the ice, out of their defending zone, without really having control over it.
> 
> Wayne Gretzky is generally considered to be the best hockey player to have ever lived. When he retired in 1999 he held 61 NHL records and (according to Wikipedia) as of 2015 only one of them had been broken. He's basically the Tiger Woods of hockey. In North America, people who don't follow hockey enough to even know what NHL stands for probably at least recognize his name.
> 
> The 1976 Philadelphia Flyers vs. Red Army game is kinda a weird game in terms of sports history. The Red Army Team had been invited to play in a series against the NHL and, coming into the last game in the series against the Flyers, they were undefeated. It is important to note that, in European hockey, fighting is strictly prohibited, it will get you kicked out of a game and potentially banned from the league so it's not really a thing. Anyway, the Red Army Team took a couple really bad hits (we're talking really bad: no foul was called and even I can see the concussion happening, forty years later on YouTube) and then walked off the ice in protest. Then they were told they wouldn't get paid if they did that, so they came back and got defeated 4-1. Personally, I think it's a pretty embarrassing victory, both for the Flyers and for the US in general. The Flyers weren't a bad team, they had some great skilled players, but the game was pretty cringe-worthy, not what I would consider a clean victory at all. Also, I don't know for certain, but I'm pretty sure the Russian team was not in a position to just decide not to get paid so... there's that.


	3. The Suicide Pass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Let's get to know Bane.
> 
> Also, I have no self control, so the chapter count went up so I can write a self-indulgent epilogue and I bumped up the rating because, while this chapter is probably still M, I finally admitted to myself that it will definitely be deserving of the E rating before it is over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I probably should have put this disclaimer at the beginning but: I'm not from Canada and have never been to Quebec so this whole fic is almost entirely unrepresentative of the very unique culture of that area. By all rights, I'm pretty sure they should all be speaking French in this fic but I chose to not even go particularly heavy on the hockey slang. I kinda do wish I knew the Newfoundland accent better though, ‘cause I would totally write Bane as having one :DD. What’s after happenen’, now, eh? LOL. Just kill me now.
> 
> Thank you to my lovely beta reader [MargaretKire](http://archiveofourown.org/users/MargaretKire/pseuds/MargaretKire/) ([mothdustmouth](https://mothdustmouth.tumblr.com/) on tumblr)

  
  
"So, I've always wondered."  John set his coffee and maple bar down on the countertop and took off his coat, shaking it out and hanging it from a hook on a nearby pillar as he sat himself down next to Bane.  
  
"Hmm?"  Bane handed over the sports section, not bothering to look up.  Something in Bane's practice schedule must have changed following the Assassins-Nighthawks' game because they had run into each other at the Donut Nook on almost every non-game day morning since then.  This did not mean that they necessarily had to interact, but John had been hurting pretty badly those first few weeks.  After weaning himself down to two ibuprofen before bed and nothing else so far as pain medication was concerned, he always got off practice with his side aching and his face swollen, no matter how much he iced it.  
  
Bane was welcome to tell him to fuck off, but as far as John was concerned, the least he could do was lend John the sports section and listen to his bad jokes and AHL predictions.  Quebec was in the middle of acquiring the St. John's Ice Caps and John had Opinions.  
  
John accepted the paper, folding it over to page two and scanning through an article on whether or not Max Friberg planned on staying with the team through the transition.  "Is it really true that people in Minnesota have to drink out of bowls?"  
  
Looking up from his perusal of the local news, Bane turned to shoot John a questioning look.  
  
John stirred a packet of artificial creamer into his coffee, pretending not to notice.  "It's just: Canada has all the cups."  
  
Bane groaned and turned back to his paper.  "You do realize I'm not actually from there?"  
  
John scoffed.  "It’s been, what, fifteen years?  You've gone native.  In fact, you might want to stop by Toronto on your way back, when the season's over, just to remind yourself what the Stanley Cup looks like."  
  
"Big talk from someone who was in diapers the last time the Canadians won anything."  
  
John almost dropped his donut.  He did a full double-take on Bane, who was calmly paging through the lifestyle section as if quipping back was something he did all the time.  He studied Bane's profile for half a second, narrowing his eyes.  The guy had a perfect poker face.  
  
"You can fuck right off, I was four and fully potty trained, thank you very much.  It was a very influential moment in my life."  
  
"Let me guess, you were inspired to become a great hockey player and vowed to one day play in the NHL."  Sounding bored and uninterested in the conversation, Bane paused on a personal interest story about a man who had built a snow-maze on his back property and accidently almost froze to death when he got lost in it overnight.  
  
John played with his maple bar for a moment, ripping off a piece and then putting it back down without eating it.  "Something like that."  
  
He licked the maple frosting off his finger and picked up his coffee cup, feeling suddenly contemplative.  The Montreal Canadiens’ 1993 Stanley Cup victory had probably been an important event for every hockey player in his age group coming out of Quebec.  But that didn't make it any less impactful on him.  
  
"I remember watching the Finals, everyone was so excited when we won and then, suddenly hockey was everywhere.  There were all these programs to promote youth hockey and people were donating equipment, that’s how I got my first pair of skates.  I was a ward of the state, so playing hockey wasn’t something I expected to get to do."  John nodded to himself, smiling and sipping his coffee.  Hockey had been a really good thing for him.  He had been an angry kid and, looking back, as much as it seemed trite to say, hockey might very well have saved his life.  "It was a big deal for me."  
  
John glanced to the side to catch Bane openly staring at him.  "What?"  He shoved a piece of donut in his mouth and pointedly re-opened the sports section without waiting for a reply.  "The Duplessis Orphans were from the 60s.  I just played hockey all the time and lived in a dorm, don't make it into a big thing."  
  
Telling new people about his childhood was never one of John's favorite things.  It hadn't been that bad and he wasn't ashamed of it, but it sometimes felt like having to come out of the closet twice: once as gay and once as having been a fucking orphan.  He wasn't an orphan anymore.  Only children were orphans.  Now he was just like any other twenty-eight-year-old man without an extended family.  Some people still got weird about it though, when they found out.  He flipped the page on his newspaper violently.  
  
"I stole my sister's My Little Pony figure skates."  Bane's voice cut through John's thoughts, causing him to look up.  
  
Bane was still watching him, but he looked amused, rather than tentative or pitying.  He had turned to face John, leaning one elbow on the counter in front of him and one on the back of his stool, his chest forming a wall between John and the rest of the dining area.  Slightly hunched, his trapezius muscles stood out on the back of his neck, making him look that much more massive.  He was sporting three-day-old stubble and the cut over his right eye had healed into a soft, pink scar that matched the color of his mouth.  His eyelashes were blond, like his hair, and his eyes were grey.  Nothing about him even suggested a smile, but there was something mischievous about the wrinkles forming in the corners of his eyes.  
  
"Come again?"  John blinked, having seemingly lost track of the conversation.  
  
"My first pair of skates.  I stole them from my older sister when I was three and refused to give them back.  They had pink laces."  
  
John raised an eyebrow incredulously.  "You could lace up your own skates at age three?"  
  
Bane shrugged and rubbed at his knuckles absentmindedly, looking away.  "I don't know, probably not.  There are photos, but I don't really remember a time before I knew how to skate."  
  
"You love it?"  
  
There was a small pause as Bane shot him a questioning glance.  John shrugged.  "You're good at it and you do it for a living."  He shrugged again.  
  
Bane sighed, running a hand over his short hair and smiling ever so slightly to himself.  "Yeah, I love it."  
  
John nodded, smiling as well and taking a sip of coffee.  "I get that."  He laughed somewhat ruefully and gestured at himself.  "Obviously.  I mean, look at me, I'm barely scraping by in the minors, but I'd take this over just about anything else, any day."  
  
"You're not a bad player."  Bane had turned to watch him again.  
  
John laughed and shook his head.  "Thanks for that, but I have come to terms with my own limitations."  He flexed his hands a bit and worried at the newly formed scar tissue on his face.  He hadn't played in a game since the surgery and it was still tender, but their next game was in four days and he desperately did not want to spend another sixty minutes watching from the bench.  Two weeks had been plenty long enough.  "I sure as shit never expected to end up as a goon in the LNAH, though, I can tell you that."  
  
Bane snorted and shook his head.  "No one expects to end up a goon."  
  
"Not even you?"  
  
Bane shrugged.  "I've always been good at fighting.  It got me more playing time and I didn't mind it so much, then I got drafted and it became all I did."  He squinted and scratched at his eyebrow.  "It gets harder and harder to do anything else, after a while."  
  
Watching Bane rub at the scars on his knuckles again, John wondered for a second if they hurt him, or if it was just a nervous habit.  It seemed strange to think of Bane as having nervous habits, or of Bane hurting.  "I've seen you with the puck a time or two.  I'm fairly certain you could sweep the ice with me, earth-shattering bodychecks notwithstanding."  
  
Bane cracked an amused smile.  "It's bad luck to bet against yourself, Baby Bird."  
  
"Har har har, very funny."  John rolled his eyes and finished his coffee.  "Here I am, being charitable, trying to bolster your clearly sensitive self image, and how do you respond?  Mockery."  
  
"Oh, so you're saying you're actually better than me?"  
  
"I'm saying, you keep your mitts on and your checking to yourself and I could skate circles around your fat ass."  
  
Bane threw his head back and laughed, then turned to John with a wide smile.  "Prove it.  Day after tomorrow, seven o'clock at the Odilon Grenier Sports Center."  
  
"You're gonna make me drive all the way to the far side of Thedford Mines on a Thursday evening?"  
  
"Well my 'fat ass' is certainly not driving all the way to Saint-Georges."  Bane's grey eyes were shining with amusement.  
  
John huffed, folding up his section of the newspaper and handing it back to Bane as he stacked his dishes, preparing to leave.  "In that case, I suppose I will see you then."  
  
~~~~~  
  
Two days later, John was pulling off his skates after afternoon practice, deep in debate with Bruce Wayne.  
  
"I'm telling you, I've watched god knows how many hours of tape, you put a little bit of pressure on that goalie and he’ll turn into a fucking sieve."  
  
Bruce scowled and shook his head.  "It's bad form to crowd the goalie."  
  
"I'm not saying go in there and take him out at the knees.  Just, you know, loom a little, especially if Gordon decides to set up shop behind the goal.  With the puck behind him and you lurking in his blind spot, that'll be all it takes, that guy will crack, I promise you."  
  
Bruce tilted his head back and forth noncommittally, stripping out of his shoulderpads and stretching.  His rotated his left shoulder and it popped loudly.  "I'll consider it."  He sighed and changed the subject.  "In the meantime, travel day tomorrow so--"  
  
"Progressive Beer Night at Charlie B's!"  Harvey crowed from across the room, cutting Bruce off.  "Come join us!"  
  
"Yes, you might even get the dubious pleasure of watching Harvey try to pull."  Bruce rolled his eyes.  
  
Harvey threw a roll of athletic tape in their direction, scowling good-naturedly.  "Not everyone gets to be a pretty boy, Wayne!  And I'd do a lot fucking better if you weren't such a cock-block."  
  
John shook his head, catching the tape in mid air and tossing it back.  "Thanks guys, but I've gotta take a rain check."  
  
"Don't tell me Killer has a date?"  Damian bounded over from across the locker room.  "No one misses Progressive Beer Night, unless they have a date!"  
  
John laughed, "Nah, nothing like that.  It's kinda funny actually.  You know Banor, the enforcer from the Assassins?  The one that, you know."  He gestured at his cheek.  
  
"Ooohh, the big bad Bane, you gonna go all Tanya Harding on his ass?"  
  
John snorted and rolled his eyes.  "We kinda weirdly know each other now, or something.  We run into each other a lot and are gonna go kick a puck around for a while, down in Thetford Mines."  
  
Damian gave him a highly disappointed look.  "Stick 'n puck with Old Man Silver, that's your idea of a good time?"  
  
"I dare you to call him that to his face."  
  
Backing away towards his side of the locker room, Damian held his hands up in deference.  "Hey now, don't put this on me, I'm just reporting the facts.  I saw that beard back in Movember and it ain't as blond as it used to be."  
  
John shook his head.  Going back to packing his gear away, he caught sight of Bruce's face as he turned.  Bruce was leveling him with a steady glare that was so incongruous with the tone of their previous conversation that it immediately took John aback.  "Everything okay there, Bruce?"  
  
"You are running practices with Patrick Banor?"  The way he said the name was almost ominous.  
  
"I highly doubt it will be anything nearly so structured."  
  
Bruce nodded solemnly, then picked up his gear bag, getting ready to leave.  Just before walking away, he looked back over his shoulder at John, his voice deadly serious.  "Wear your helmet and don't let your guard down.  I trust I don't have to tell you that he's dangerous.  Be careful."  
  
John watched, bewildered, as he walked away, the rest of the players starting to file out behind him.  
  
_Don't let your guard down?  What the fuck?_  
  
~~~~~  
  
John pulled into the Odilon Grenier Sports Center parking lot at five past seven that evening.  He was tired and stiff, having already spent, between morning and afternoon practice, the better part of five hours on the ice and his legs had stiffened up during the hour-long drive from Saint-Georges.  He pawed through his equipment bag, yawning as he stashed a puck in his pocket and pulled out his skates and his gloves.  He looked at his helmet for a second.  It had been a long day and he wasn't particularly interested in gearing up for anything serious.  He closed up the bag, grabbing his stick and locking the car, leaving the helmet inside.  If Bane couldn't play nice, he would just leave.  
  
They were holding a public skate session in the indoor rink, which threw John for a second, but then he was directed back outside to the outdoor rink, where it was considerably less crowded.  Hockey gear was allowed and there were a few high school kids messing around, trying to teach each other trick shots, while a bored looking supervisor with a whistle and a referee sweater skated lazy figure eights around center ice.  
  
John blew into his hands and pulled his collar up around his ears, sitting down on the frozen bench to put his skates on, then stepped out onto the ice.  It felt weird to not have pads on.  He did a couple of lazy slaloms, then transitioned to figure eights and flipped around backwards, going into slaloms again.  If felt good.  It was a quite night and it struck John all of a sudden how long it had been since he had skated in the open air, without the weight of his pads, and without a specific goal in mind or a regimen of drills to work on.  
  
As he skated, his muscles warmed up and the cramps in his legs loosened.  The air was cold, but not punishing, and Sports Arena provided a decent wind screen.  Just as he was considering the merits of dropping the puck he still carried in his pocket and shuffling it around for awhile, he noticed Bane step out onto the ice.  
  
As always, the man looked effortlessly, devastatingly attractive, casually skating across the ice in his worn-out jeans and sheepskin coat with the collar popped up around his ears.  The bright red hockey gloves were a little discongruous to the rugged, rustic image, but then he skated past and, with a little nod in acknowledgment, dropped them in the corners of the goalie box to form an impromptu goal.  
  
John had to hold back a sigh.  He had spent the whole day around excellent hockey players, all of them good skaters, and Bane wasn't even doing anything particularly interesting, but the way he moved across the ice made all of John's mental processes want to just stop, sit back and watch.  Maybe it was the surreal atmosphere of the evening, or John's tiredness, or seeing Bane, for the first time, on the ice without his full uniform and pads, or maybe it was just John and fourteen years of built up longing, but whatever it was, John was lost.  
  
He pulled the puck out of his pocket, dropping it on the ice and passing it to Bane as he approached.  "I was starting to wonder if you were coming or not."  
  
"I hit traffic."  
  
John raised an eyebrow, feeling like might he might be slowly catching on to Bane's deadpan humor.  "Two cars at a four-way stop?  I know what you mean, they should really start putting in traffic circles.  I never figured you'd be one to have trouble claiming an intersection, though, I guess you really are Canadian."  
  
Bane seemed taken aback for a second, and then laughed and smiled, showing his teeth.  He was missing the lateral incisor and canine on one side.  John had never noticed before and the surprise must have shown on his face because Bane's smile became abruptly a lot more tight-lipped and self-conscious.  
  
"That couldn't have just happened?"  No use pretending he hadn't noticed.  
  
"No, it was back in junior hockey.  I have a bridge normally, but it's not permanent and sometimes it gets loose.  It seems stupid to get implants while I'm still getting hit all the time."  Bane smiled ruefully and tongued at the hole where he teeth were missing.  "Too bad it wasn't the crooked ones though, eh?"  
  
Fuck if it wasn't a stupidly endearing smile, even with the two missing teeth.  John did his best to repress his initial reaction, which was to melt right into the ice, and just shrugged nonchalantly.  "I dunno, it's not too bad.  Makes you look like Bobby Clarke."  
  
Bane raised an eyebrow.  "And that's a good thing?"  
  
John gave a scandalized gasp, stealing the puck and skating backwards with it.  He had had quite enough of standing around talking about the quality Bane's smile.  "How is that even a question?  Bobby Clarke is a legend!"  
  
"Bobby Clarke had no front teeth."  Bane skated after him, smiling indulgently and not seeming all that interested in trying to take the puck back.  
  
 John dodged around him, circling behind his back and passing the puck forward, between Bane's feet, only to catch it again on the other side.  He shrugged.  "So?  Two Stanley Cups and great hair: what's not to love?  He was a Flyer though, so that's a bit of a turn off, but he did come back to play on the Canadian National Team, so I'll overlook it."  
  
"The Canadian National Team lost."  
  
"I'm being charitable."  
  
At some point they had flipped around so that Bane's back was to the goal line.  John allowed himself to drift casually to the right, then shot the puck around, behind Bane's back, and changed directions, blowing past him on the left and catching up with the puck again as he raced towards the goal.  The puck sailing easily between Bane’s discarded hockey gloves.  
  
He chased down the puck as it glanced off the backboards and passed it off to Bane, giving him a big, cheeky smile.  "One - nothing, Bigshot, and here I thought you were supposed to be some kind of a big deal."  
  
Bane gave him an amused look and took the puck back to the red line, skating a lazy arc around the center circle before coming back towards the goal.  
  
Bane was good.  He was fast, quick on his feet, agile, and definitely not in the NHL for nothing.  But Bane was a physical player and clearly not used to playing non-contact, so they were both a bit surprised when John was able to force him to the side of the rink without him getting a shot in.  
  
Never one to waste an opportunity, John wiggled his eyebrows as he skated backwards with the puck to reset at the red line.  "Don't worry Bigshot, I'll show you how it's done."  
  
Making a quick turn at the center circle, he skated back towards goal.  Bane closed the gap and John moved the puck around in front of him, from side to side, trying to get Bane flat footed, or to commit to a lane.  For a second, he thought he saw an opening and tried to brush past with a quick change of speed, but Bane was already there, like a brick wall, knocking him back and off his feet.  
  
He felt himself starting to go down, but before he could hit the ice, he heard the clatter of a stick being dropped and suddenly there was a hand on the back of his head and another on his hip, holding him steady.  
  
Bane had big hands, warm hands.  John could feel their heat soaking through fabric of his jeans and the hand in his hair felt inexplicably intimate.  He looked up into Bane's face, that was also suddenly very close, and his breath hitched.  
   
_Fuck me, this is just not fair._  
  
"Uh."  
  
_How every eloquent.  Get up.  Stop being so goddamn awkward._  
  
"Thanks."  
  
_Ugh, still awkward as fuck.  Now, get up._  
  
Bane's hands dropped away as John regained his balance and stood up.  He crouched to pick up his stick, then turned to look at John with a stony expression on his face.  "I apologize."  
  
"For the check?  It's fine.  I was being kind of a dick.  We'll just keep it friendly from now on."  
  
Bane glanced to the side, absently playing with his stick.  "I'm not sure I know how to play that way anymore."  He looked incredibly sad.  
  
A strange thought occurred to John.  He tilted his head to one side, squinting curiously over at Bane, who was still glaring resignedly at the ice.  "Do you even like being called Bane?"  
  
Bane grimaced and scratched at the scar over his eyebrow.  "Sometimes."  
  
"I don't have to call you that.  I'll call you what you want."  
  
Bane glanced to the side for a second, then looked up to meet John's eyes.  "My name is Patrick."  
  
"Well, Patrick," John gave out a loud exhale and nodded, skating over to where the puck had skidded off to the side and kicking it back towards him, "you have come to the right place.  As it so happens, I play for the Nighthawks, by all accounts the wimpiest team in the league.  It'll take some work, but if you're willing to put the effort in, I'm sure I can teach you our ways."  
  
He smiled and waited and, after a while, Bane cracked a smile as well.  
  
~~~~~  
  
They skated for another hour, maybe hour and a half, almost until the end of the skating session, before John stopped being able to hold back his yawns and they decided to call it quits.  It had been fun, a little hard, at first, to let go of the competitive mindset that seemed pretty hard-wired into both of them, but they slowly had gotten the hang of it and, by the end of the evening, had been downright playful.  It made John a little regretful that they had to stop, when he finally pleaded exhaustion and packed himself into his car for the half hour drive home.  
  
He rolled down the driver's side window and turned up the radio to keep himself alert as he sped down the dark highway.  The cold air bit at his face and fingers, making him pull his hat down over his ears and curl his fingers into the cuffs of his jacket.  He felt giddy despite the chill and couldn't help smiling and humming along with the radio.  Bane had a beautiful, shy smile, a dry sense of humor, could skate like a dream and wanted John to call him Patrick.  
  
_How is this my life?_  
  
John gripped the steering wheel harder, laughing to himself and shaking his head at the unlikelihood of it all.  
  
_Goddamn, how is this my life?_  
  
It made him wonder about what Bruce had said, about John needing to watch himself.  Bane was an enforcer, sure, and he did his job well.  John had picked a fight with him on the ice and Bane had shut him down without hesitation.  But it hadn't been vicious or vindictive or deliberately harmful and the idea of Patrick doing something like that without provocation seemed almost bizarre.  
  
John pulled into his parking space in front of his building and walked up the stairs to his unit.  Bruce had enjoyed a long career in the NHL before being knocked back to the minor leagues seven years before, so he and Bane had definitely played against each other in the past, but John didn't remember any big rivalry being reported between them.  He sighed as he walked into his apartment, dumping his gear on the floor and stripping out of his various layers before powering on his laptop.  He wandered into the kitchen to grab a Kokanee out of the fridge while it booted up and scrolled through his contact list on his cell phone.  
  
It rang for a second before JC picked up.  "Well if it isn't Jack the Giant Killer himself!  How's the face?"  
  
"Good, good.  Hey, do you remember there ever being anything weird between Bruce Wayne and Patrick Banor back in the 00's?"  If anyone would know, it would be JC.  
  
"Bane V. Wayne, yeah, sure, they have some history.  Why?  Has Wayne sworn revenge?  Is shit going down?  You gonna give me the deets, man, don't hold out!"  
  
"I don't think so.  Bruce was just being weird at practice today and, I don't know, he's a weird guy so who really knows?  But if there's some ancient rivalry going on I'd rather just know about it, you know?"  
  
"Yeah, yeah, I feel you, I'm a gossip whore myself as well.  You on your computer?"  
  
"Logging on now."  John typed in his password, leaning back into the couch and taking a swig of beer.  He was tired, but in a very contented kind of way.  It had been a good week and his ribs were hardly bothering him at all.  He doubted that anything JC found would be particularly bad, Bruce was probably just being his normal, paranoid self.  
  
"Alright, I'm sending you a link."  
  
A google message popped up and John clicked on the link, then almost did a spit take, coughing as he inhaled half his beer and quickly tried to close out of the video.  
  
"What the fuck?  Did you just send me porn?"  
  
"Gay porn, Dude, I'm watching out for you."  
  
"Did you just intentionally send me gay porn?!"  
  
"Come on man, live a little!  Put out the bat signal, or at least seek out some proper adult video entertainment."  
  
John covered his face with one hand and groaned.  "Fuck you JC, fuck you so much right now."  
  
John may or may not have gotten a tattoo on his eighteenth birthday and the tattoo in question may or may not have been of the bat symbol.  He had gotten it low on the side of his hip, just below the waistband of his pants.  So, if he chose to go out, which was rare, and wear skinny-jeans, which was rarer, and his shirt happened to ride up, the very top of the tattoo would be visible.  Because this set of circumstances generally only came together when John was trying to get laid, JC had dubbed it 'putting out the bat signal.'  It made John hate himself, just a tiny bit.  
  
"I'm serious, this is me, as a friend, concerned about the state of your health.  You seriously need to let off some steam."  
  
"Can we move on from this part of the conversation, please?"  
  
"Sure thing, Batboy."  A second link showed up on John's computer screen.  
  
"If I click on this, what am I going to see?"  
  
"Two hot, sweaty men going at it."  
  
"I really hate you sometimes."  
  
"On hockey skates even, so it should be right up your alley."  
  
"Why are we friends?"  John clicked the link.  
  
It was a five minute clip of a game from the mid 2000s, the New York Rangers vs. the Minnesota Wild.  JC narrated, presumably having also started the video on his own computer.  
  
"Wayne was a strong force for the Rangers back then, if you remember, and he and Bane might have kinda had a rivalry, but the Wild were still a new team and not very good so it never really became a thing.  They had a couple of good fights, but as far as I know it wasn't anything personal, so if you're looking for hard feelings, it would probably be from this."  
  
John watched his screen.  The Rangers' center had the puck and was moving it down towards their attacking zone.  He was getting squeezed left, towards the boards, so he passed off to Wayne.  The pass was too tight, coming right to Wayne's skates instead of out in front, to his stick, and he had to look down at his feet to receive it.  Just as he did, Bane slammed into him head-on.  Wayne did a full flip over Bane's right hip and crashed into the ice, landing heavily on his head and left shoulder.  
  
"Fuck."  John continued to watch as the clip was shown again, in slow motion, and then from a few different angles.  
  
"Yeah, they ruled it a legal check and everything, but it put Wayne out of commission for a while and people were worried he wouldn't be able to play again because of the head injury."  
  
"He did come back to play the next season though,"  John confirmed.  
  
"Yeah, but that was the start of all his shoulder problems.  I think he had, wait a second."  There was a short pause and JC clicked around for a second.  "Three, no wait... Whatever, it doesn't matter, the point is: he had a bunch of surgeries and then got kicked down to the minor leagues and, obviously, ended up in the LNAH.  Nobody's saying it was all because of this one incident, but it probably had at least something to do with it."  
  
"Huh."  
  
"For a while, right after it happened, there were a couple people trying to push for criminal charges, but it didn't go anywhere, it was a legal check.  I'm telling you though, John, somebody tries to send you a suicide pass like that, you just let that shit go right on by.  It ain't worth it."  
  
"Hmm."  John hit the replay button and watched the clip again.  It was a brutal hit.  
  
They chatted for a few more minutes as John finished his beer, then rang off, both of them having to be up early the next day.  After hanging up, John continued to sit, absently playing with the empty beer bottle and staring at his computer screen.  
  
He opened up his chat log again and scrolled to the links JC had sent him earlier, hovering his mouse over them for a second before clicking on the first one.  
  
The sound of harsh breathing filled the room and he immediately turned the volume on his computer all the way down.  The video showed a man, strong, broad chested, sitting naked in an old-fashioned captain's chair.  He might have been blond, but it was hard to tell for sure because the shot was only from the shoulders down and he was shaved.  The man stroked himself for the camera, then gestured to someone offscreen.  
  
Another actor entered the frame, shorter, with a smaller build.  It made him look young but his face wasn't in the shot, so it was hard to tell.  He climbed unceremoniously onto the other man's lap.  Big hands reached around to grasp his hips, then spread his cheeks for the camera and guided him down.  He arched his back, bracing himself on the armrests on either side of him until he was fully seated, then started to ride.  The other actor's hands continued to hold him, guiding him up and down.  
  
John played with his beer bottle, watching those hands.  They were so big.  
  
He closed out of the video and shut down his computer, hauling himself off to bed.  
  
_Fuck my life right now._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A "suicide pass" is a long pass to a moving teammate's feet (ideally, a pass is further out in front, a leading pass, where it is easier to see/control). This causes the teammate to look down and be open to a devastating body check as they receive the puck.
> 
> The Duplessis Orphans: Basically there was a lot of poverty in Quebec in the mid-20th century. The province received federal subsidies to help take care of orphans and psychiatric patients, but received more than twice as much money for psychiatric patients. So, sometime in the 30s, the Premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis, re-categorized all the orphanages as psychiatric hospitals, had all the kids declared mentally incompetent, and put the whole thing under the control of certain religious orders within the Catholic Church. It got really fucked up really quickly, we're talking medical experimentation, physical and sexual abuse, the works. The system was quietly disbanded in 1962 and pretty much just swept under the rug until the 90s, when some of the surviving victims stepped forward seeking restitution. This is not actually gonna be part of the story at all... just random Canadian history.
> 
> Maybe this is obvious, but Stick 'n Puck is basically like public skate, where anyone can come and pay to skate, except that you can bring your stick and puck with you. Most places require everyone to wear a helmet, but I'm just gonna pretend that this rink in rural Canada gives zero shits about insurance liabilities.
> 
> Bobby Clarke (center) was team captain of the Philadelphia Flyers in the early years of the franchise. He was instrumental in developing the playing style that earned them the name "The Broad Street Bullies" and led the team to two Stanley Cups (1974, 1975). He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1987 and his toothless grin is considered one of the iconic images of hockey. That being said, he's also always been a pretty controversial figure and some people really dislike him for various reasons that I'm not gonna spend a ton of time going into. Here's a photo if you're curious: [Bobby Clarke](https://harlanhardway.tumblr.com/post/163061333105/bobby-clarke-of-the-broad-street-bullies)


	4. 3 Goal Lead

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally! An update!! I hope y'all like it :DDD
> 
> Thank you to my lovely beta reader [MargaretKire](http://archiveofourown.org/users/MargaretKire/pseuds/MargaretKire/) ([mothdustmouth](https://mothdustmouth.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr)

  
  
Bane frowned as he put down the Monday morning paper. John tried to tug the sports section away from him, but he had it trapped under his elbows and it looked likely to rip before John had any chance of dislodging it. John swatted at him and rolled his eyes but Bane simply stared on impassively.

"You didn't wear a face shield."

"Is that somehow related to my ability to read the sports page?"

Bane held his gaze for a moment longer, then lifted his elbow, allowing John to steal the paper out from under him. "Why didn't you wear a face shield?"

"I don't like looking at the rink from inside a fishbowl."

"You could wear a cage."

John looked up from the weekend sports summary with a smirk. "Thanks for asking, but bondage isn't my thing."

Bane was nonplussed, not so much as raising an eyebrow as he continued to stare bullets at the side of John's head.

Sighing, John allowed his face to fall a little as he slumped against the counter. He knew he looked like shit again and it was probably, definitely, his fault. The doctor had cleared him to play the week before and he had managed exactly one game without getting into a fight. On Saturday, game two of his return, he had gotten in a bit of a brawl with an enforcer from the Predators and, while it had gone pretty quickly in his favor, he had taken a hit to the face that had broken his nose and given him a nasty black eye. It had completely missed his still-healing cheekbone though, so there was that.

He made to rub at his face, then aborted the gesture. His whole head throbbed and he was lucky to still be breathing through his nose. "It looks worse than it is. The guy barely got in one hit before the tie-downs on his jersey failed. I pulled it over his head and sent him off to the sin bin with a good spanking."

Bane snorted and finally turned away, taking a bite of his apple fritter. "Kinky."

John smiled and shook his head. He wasn't sure he'd ever get used to Bane joking lightly back. They had an easy camaraderie at this point. It had been more than week since their little excursion to the ice rink and he still didn't quite know what, exactly, that had been about. Bane liked him, he was fairly confident of that and sometimes he would catch Bane looking at him as they sat next to each other, drinking their morning coffee and sharing a newspaper, but, as far as John was concerned, that could mean a lot of different things.

The problem was not so much that John had no game as it was that John had no chill. He kept his sex life and his hockey entirely separated. When he was in the locker room, in the gym, or on the ice, if he was watching someone's ass he was probably genuinely critiquing their squat technique. Anywhere else? Well, JC wasn't entirely wrong about John's seduction methods. Subtlety was not his strong suit; the only signals John was accustomed to interpreting were the ones being telegraphed across a hockey rink by a man in black and white referee stripes.

John certainly did like Bane, though. They had a good thing going, whatever it was, and it was new enough to be intriguing rather than frustrating. Part of that was him adjusting to the reality that they even talked to each other. He had dropped the bomb on JC a few days previous, that he was now on a friendly, first-name-basis with Patrick "Bane" Banor and was still riding high on the amount of gloating that had entitled him to.

"Concussion?" Bane had gone back to his paper but was obviously far from finished with his interrogation.

"Naw, just a little love tap with the ugly stick." John hadn't felt particularly concussed after the fight. There was no way to know for certain without a CT scan or an MRI, but he could could count down from ten just fine, and who wouldn't have a headache right after breaking their nose?

Bane looked over the top of his paper towards the coffee machine opposite the breakfast counter. He wasn't frowning, but he didn't look happy either. "Even if they clear you, when you take a hit to the head, don't drink right afterwards and don't go home alone."

John raised an eyebrow. "What? Sober sex is the Patrick Banor home remedy for concussions? I would love to see ESPN to do a feature on that"

Bane snorted and opened his paper again, the weird contemplative mood finally broken. "All I'm saying is: they are shit at diagnosing concussions in this league so either learn to self-monitor or learn to duck."

"Har har har, very funny. You wish you had my win-loss ratio."

"Tell that to your face. I am your win-loss ratio."

"Where do you get your comebacks, the middle school playground?"

"No, when I leave my come at a middle school playground, I generally don't want it back."

"I had heard you were a supporter of 4-H, didn't know you liked to make the deposits in person, though."

"Only for the sheep."

"That's a bit discriminatory."

"I like to think of it as discerning."

John took a sip of coffee, going back to their original conversation. "Well, we have a bye this week so, either way, I'll have plenty of time to recover."

Bane hummed and nodded in acknowledgment. "We play at home on Saturday."

"Yeah?" John tried to make it sound casual, like a question, and not something he was 300% aware of and had been planning to livestream while video chatting with JC like the die-hard fanboy he secretly still was.

"You could come," Bane commented, equally casual.

"Um..." The Assassins and the Nighthawks weren't exactly rivals, per se. The Assassins were at the top of the league and the Nighthawks, while doing better recently, were barely even in the running for the playoffs.

But they weren't exactly not rivals either.

"When was the last time you went to a hockey game where you weren't actually on the team?" Bane leaned back for a second to dig around in the pocket of his coat, which was hanging off the back of his stool, and then slid two tickets across the counter towards John, cocking a sly smile. "Come. Bring that weird friend of yours, you'll have fun."

Carefully picking the tickets up, John brought them to his face to examine while Bane blithely went back to his paper.

**The Thetford Mines Assassins vs. The Pont Rouge Chiefs. Saturday, February 26, 7:00pm.**

"Um..."

Bane's newspaper rustled as he turned the page. "What are you worried about? It's not like anyone will recognize you."

"Oh, fuck you ever much. Just for that, I think I just became a Chiefs fan." John tucked the tickets away into his pocket.

~~~~~

Practice that week did not go well.

The Nighthawks were no longer at the bottom of the league. Wayne seemed to have rediscovered his interest in the game and the team was rallying behind his newfound enthusiasm. Gordon and Harvey controlled the pace of the offense and, with Wayne and Blake backing them up, it was getting to the point where skill players like Damian were finally able to stretch their legs a little. It was starting to look like there might be a chance they could even make the playoffs.

But then: Saturday. John had been hoping to stay out of fighting for another week at least, but when Gordon got taken out of the game with a brutal check from behind, he couldn't let it go unanswered. Unfortunately, the damage had already been done. Gordon had hit his knee hard going down and been taken off the ice on a stretcher. He had torn his meniscus and would be in recovery for the rest of the season at least, if it hadn't ended his career altogether. Either way, they were in the market for a new team captain.

Harvey was the logical choice, but he was even more of a boyscout than Gordon had been and,without Gordon there to ease the tension, he and Bruce butted heads like two dogs pissing on the same rock.

Thursday evening found John sitting behind the counter at the skate rental desk chatting with Selina Kyle, who had been working there for most of the season. He wasn't usually one to bellyache, but after a week of dashed hopes and ineffective leadership, he had a desperate need to vent. Selina was just the right combination of bitingly sarcastic and completely uncaring about anything even remotely hockey related to make the perfect sounding board.

Selina had grown up in Saint-Georges, but had left fairly young and only been back for a few months. Why she had returned at all was the topic of much supposition around town; she was smoking hot and only recently retired from being world-class speed skater. John had once bought a Wheaties box with her face on it. John mostly kept himself out of the gossip, whatever her reasons were, they were her own. He liked her attitude and didn't press into her personal life and, for Selina's part, she seemed to have sussed out that John was probably the only man within fifty square miles guaranteed not to hit on her.

"That's what you get for playing a team sport," Selina responded to John's tirade with zero sympathy, as she disinfected a pair of recently returned skates.

"At least we have another week to figure this shit out. God, it sucks. We were really starting to come together." John continued, undeterred. There was something deeply satisfying about complaining to someone who was guaranteed to not give any constructive advice.

"How tragic." Selina sprayed down another pair of skates, clearly disinterested in every aspect of her current situation.

"And I don't understand why Coach Fox keeps running us through conditioning drills, like that will somehow help. I can run suicides on my own, we should be scrimmaging, or working on our offensive strategy, or something."

"Riveting." The spray can hissed again.

John sighed and leaned back against the wall. "Anyway, I have tickets to the Assassins' game on Saturday, do you want to come?"

"What, exactly, in our two months acquaintance, has convinced you that the answer to that question could ever possibly be yes?"

John made a face and tapped his foot as he thought, then followed Selina further behind the counter as she went to reshelve the skates. "Ugh, okay, so, the deal is: I think I might need a wingman."

Selina turned towards him, showing some attention for the first time since they started the conversation. "Oh really now? I thought you were a wingman."

"Cute, you know what I mean." John tried to scrunched his nose, then immediately stopped, it was still swollen and sore. He ran a hand through his hair instead. "Someone might have given me the tickets to come see them play."

"Who?"

"Patrick Banor."

"Is that supposed to mean something to me?"

"Bane."

"Yeah, still not helping."

"He's on the Assassins."

"Swings for your side, does he?"

He gave her a dirty look. "I don't know."

"Well," Selina leaned in with a smile, then flicked the end of John's on the nose with her pen before ducking around him back to the desk, "color me intrigued."

She pulled out a checklist and started ticking off boxes. "You can pick me up from my apartment at six. Don't expect me to cheer or pay any attention to the game. I don't know the rules and don't want to learn them."

"No problem."

"I do expect you to tell me all of the gossip and to make it interesting. If you start talking about hockey or get too boring, I reserve the right to ignore you."

"Fair enough."

"And, at the end of the game, if everything goes well for you and you want to leave with this Bane person, you will not be ditching me, I will be ditching you."

"Sounds like a deal."

"As long as we're clear."

~~~~~

That Saturday, John spent maybe a bit longer getting ready to go watch a hockey game than he would ever freely admit to. Most of the swelling had gone down on his face, but the bridge of his nose was still a bit puffier than usual and the dark bruising around his eye had faded into unattractive splotches of yellow and greenish brown.

He had briefly considered makeup.

He had briefly considered his skinny jeans.

He had even, for the briefest of brief moments, considered wearing Assassins' red and black, before getting pissed at himself for everything about his behavior, washing his face, throwing on the first pair of jeans he got his hands on, pulling on a flannel shirt and his Montreal Canadiens hat, grabbing his old beat-up parka, and walking out the door before he could think twice about it.

Selina gave him a once-over with a very critical eye when he picked her up, but he just scowled and put the truck in drive, trying not to over-analyze the wisdom of bringing a wingman along who was, objectively, much hotter than him.

She caught his expression and rolled her eyes dramatically. "If what you told me is true and his brand of flirting really is to punch you in the face and then quietly ignore you over weeks of donuts and burnt coffee, then your," she gestured at his entire existence, "adorably approachable, Canadian boy-next-door look is going to go over much better than my," she gestured at herself, "impeccably well dressed, poised and perfect ten."

John groaned and pulled out onto the highway. "Can we just, ugh." He pulled his toque down over his ears. They were having a cold snap and the heater in his truck wasn't quite strong enough to keep the cab fully warm. "Can we just watch the game and pretend this isn't happening?"

She shrugged and leaned forward, adjusting the heating vents to her liking. "You do look precious in that gigantic parka. If he's looking for something sweet and pocket-sized, you're definitely playing to your audience, and if he's not," she leaned back in her seat and gave John a delighted smile that somehow managed to also be slightly disturbing, "we'll just have to improvise."

"You are scary sometimes, Selina."

"I know, it's how I weed out the weak."

"Let's just play this cool, okay? See what happens."

~~~~~

Playing things cool was not John's strong suite. It was somewhat the opposite of his strong suit, especially if hockey was involved.

"HEY! NUMBER 53!"

John was on his feet, yelling down at the Chief's penalty box.

They were half-way through the third period and John hadn't sat down once since five minutes into the start of the game. The Assassins had started out slow, initially allowing three unanswered goals from the Chiefs, then making a comeback in the second period, bringing the score to 2-3 and then 3-3 at the beginning of the third, before the Chiefs were able to squeeze in a fourth goal, bringing the score to 3-4 for the Chiefs with fifteen minutes left in the game.

John loved hockey. He got very invested in hockey. As a player, he was able to funnel that intensity onto the ice, but when he wasn't, well, there were only so many ways one could express one's self as a spectator.

"NUMBER 53!"

Malone, player number 53 for the Chiefs, pretended he couldn't hear. He was sitting out a seven minute penalty, five for fighting and two for instigating. It was his second fight of the game and both of them had been against Bane. He'd lost, but winning didn't seem to have been the point. The Chiefs had been trying to draw Bane into fights all night, hoping to get him tossed out of the game with a game misconduct penalty. It made for a good show for anyone who liked to watch gladiator fights, but was obviously frustrating as hell for Bane.

Unfortunately for Malone, John and Selina were seated directly behind, and only about five rows back, from the penalty box.

"NUMBER 53!"

Malone finally turned around.

"I JUST THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW, THEY SPELLED SHITSTAIN WRONG ON THE BACK OF YOUR JERSEY!"

Malone flipped him off and faced forward again.

"HEY SHITSTAIN!" It was too late, once John started heckling, he could not be stopped. "WAS THAT SUPPOSED TO BE A FIGHT JUST NOW?! YOU SUCK! I'VE BANGED YOUR WIFE HARDER THAN THAT!"

Malone looked back at John again, starting to get pissed. He stood up. "Who the fuck do you think you are, asshole?!"

"MY NAME'S THREE GOAL LEAD, SHITSTAIN! WHY DON'T YOU COME UP HERE AND BLOW ME?!"

By this point Selina was positively shaking with suppressed laughter and Malone was standing up on the bench, looking like he might be about to try and climb over the plexiglass wall of the penalty box.

"Oh my God, John, sit down, you're being recorded." Selina's protests weren't particularly convincing as she laughed out loud, completely unconcerned about the 250lb enforcer, practically foaming at the mouth twenty feet below them inside the penalty box. Needless to say, John did not stop.

"OR SHOULD I COME DOWN TO YOU?! YOU SEEM TO SUCK HARDER WHEN YOU'RE ON THE ICE!"

"Jesus Christ, John." John had taken half a step down towards the penalty box and Selina was half-heartedly holding him back with one hand on his sleeve as she doubled over with laughter. Thankfully, before anything could escalate further, a lineman skated over and threatened Malone with a game misconduct penalty if he didn't sit his ass down.

"THAT'S RIGHT, SHITSTAIN, SIT ON THAT BENCH! THIS IS HOCKEY! IF I WANTED TO WATCH A CANDLESTICK TRY TO FUCK A TEAPOT I'D GO SEE DISNEY ON ICE!"

Malone visibly fumed, but stayed put.

The Assassins scored again two minutes later and then, after a dramatic ten minutes of back and forth, won the game in overtime. Selina still stubbornly refused to allow John to explain any of the calls to her, but even she was on her feet for the last five minutes and genuinely cheered right along with him when the final buzzer went off.

They both laughed and sat back down on the bench, letting the crowd thin out a bit before trying to battle their way out of the stadium.

John felt good, light. He had forgotten how much he enjoyed watching a live game and Selina had been excellent company. Her frosty, femme fatale exterior had relaxed somewhat as the game progressed, to the point where John could half-way imagine that they might genuinely be on the verge of becoming actual friends.

She smirked at him, then dug around in her bag for a compact so she could check her make up. "Well, if you were going for 'sweet, innocent baby doll,' the massive amount of trash talking you just did might have ruined it, but I think you might still be in the running for most Canadian frat-boy ever. Now," satisfied with the state of her eyeliner, she closed the compact with a sharp click, "what is the plan?"

John smiled and shrugged vaguely. He was in a good mood and was not in a hurry to have it ruined by whatever did or did not happen next re: Bane. He was thinking about waving off the question and suggesting they just head home, when his phone went off in his pocket.

He pulled it out to look. There was a text from Bane.

**I should have known you'd like to chirp, Baby Bird**

He and Bane had exchanged phone numbers earlier that week and John stared at the message for a second in surprise, then typed out a quick reply and pressed send before Selina could express an opinion.

**_Reggie Dunlop ain't got nothing on me_ **

She snatched up his phone anyway and looked over the thread. "He calls you Baby Bird and you're still not sure if he's interested? What is your damage, John? Also, why are you bringing another guy into this? I'm starting to think maybe you're the one giving out the mixed signals."

"No, it's from a movie, Reggie Dunlop was the captain of the Chiefs and..." John scrambled to grab his phone back as it went off again. "He'll get it, trust me, anyone who plays hockey would get it."

**Slap Shot, I haven't seen that in ages**

**_more's the pity, it's a classic_ **

**the team's going out to The Elbow Room, if you want to come**

"Don't say no, but don't say yes either." Selina was watching the exchange from over John's shoulder.

He looked over at her. "How am I supposed to do that?"

"You don't want to go out with the team, you will never in a million years get laid if you go out with the team. But don't give him a hard no either, you want him to know you're interested. Don't be vague though, and don't come on too strong."

He glared at her for a second then looked down at his phone again, biting his lip and considering before carefully picking out the phrase:

_**have had double practices all week, kinda tired, not sure how rowdy I want to get** _

"Okay, good. Now now tell him you have to drop me at my boyfriend's first."

He pressed send. "I thought you were going to be my backup fake girlfriend, just in case?"

She gave him a very condescending look. "Honey, he just called you Baby Bird and judging by your reaction, not for the first time. He definitely saw you, he definitely saw me, now tell him we're not dating and give the guy an opening."

**_I've got to drop my friend off at her boyfriend's first, how late u staying out?_ **

He glanced over at Selina, who nodded, then pressed send. A few second passed. The message was marked as read and three dots appeared at the top of the screen, then disappeared, then reappeared again.

"Fuck! I have no text game. I hate this!" John threw his head back in frustration.

The phone went off in his hand with another text alert.

**not late, kinda tired too. want to watch Slap Shot instead?**

"Netflix and chill!" John punched the air and turned to Selina for a high five. "Fucking hell, Selina, you are the best wingman in existence."

She smiled back at him archly and slapped his hand. "And don't you forget it."

**_Sure, address?_ **

John pressed send, grinning so hard his cheeks hurt.

~~~~~

Forty-five minutes later, John pulled up to Bane's apartment in Saint-Joseph-de-Beauce, having dropped Selina off at her place on the way over. Bane lived right down the street from the Donut Nook, which kinda made sense, considering how often he went there.

He must have just gotten home when John knocked, because he answered the door with his hair tousled and his boots still on, his hockey gear piled up haphazardly in the entryway. He gestured John inside, quickly kicking off his boots and slipping into a pair of houseshoes.

"You can keep your shoes on, I don't have any spare slippers."

Looking across the immaculately clean carpet of the living room, John glanced over at Bane, then crouched to unlace boots. "I think I'd rather take them off, if it's all the same to you."

"Yeah, sure. That's fine." Bane retreated into the kitchen, reemerging with a beer in each hand. He offered one to John, then started fumbling around with the TV until he found a version of Slap Shot available for streaming. He paused it, watching the screen while the video buffered and taking a slow drink of his beer.

John stepped forward, reaching up to lightly rest his hand on Bane's arm. Bane tensed and turned towards him, but didn't pull away. This part John was good at, decisiveness. There was no way in hell he was drinking a beer before he had fully established whether or not he would be needing to make a strategic retreat.

_I let you call me Baby Bird, you fucking asshole. Don't you dare tell me I got the wrong impression._

John slid his hand very carefully up Bane's arm to his neck, and then his jaw, watching Bane's reaction carefully. His stubble was coarse, bristly. John rasped his thumb across it, then pulled Bane down towards him. Bane followed his hand, but held himself otherwise very still, both hands up, framing John, but not touching him.

When they kissed it was very, very soft. Plush was the word that came to mind. Bane's lips were plush and full and he tasted like beer and distilled water, bitter but clean, and they opened for John, moving against his slowly, like he was something to be savored.

John let his hand slide back to bury itself in Bane's hair, resting his other hand on Bane's hip and arching his body upwards even as he brought Bane down towards himself. He breathed in deeply through his nose and rubbed his face against Bane's rough cheek. Then rose up onto his toes, drawing himself further into Bane's mouth, pushing in with his tongue and burrowing under Bane's shirt with his hand to palm at the warm skin on his back and moan at how good it felt. Bane was so solid.

John had never been the type to try to climb anyone like a tree, so it took him a second to realize he was doing it. He pulled back, lifting an eyebrow at Bane as he looked down at him, expression unreadable, but soft.

John smiled, taking Bane's beer and the television controller out of his hands and putting them down next to his on the coffee table, then pressed Bane back to sit on the couch and straddled his legs. They looked at eachother for a second, flushed, but not yet breathing hard. Bane swallowed, slowly and deliberately. His hands rested on John's hips and John's rested on Bane's biceps. He rubbed slow circles into the muscle with his thumbs.

Bane's hands played with the hem of John's shirt, dipping under it to tentatively trace up the planes of John's back and draw him forward. As John leaned into him, they got more daring, more territorial, groping at him, palming at his pecs, counting his ribs. John brought his hands back up to Bane's hair, tracing the line of Bane's jaw and biting and sucking at his mouth, dragging his teeth across those soft lips and tounging at the scar that ran across his cheek. His thumb found the break in Bane's eyebrow and he rubbed at it possessively as Bane's hands came around to his front, exploring his chest, then wrapped around to his back again to run along the waistline of his pants.

He lifted up onto his knees, letting Bane's hands slid down the back of his jeans, under the soft cotton of his boxer briefs. He shuddered as he felt Bane's hands, hot against his bare skin. There was just enough room for them to fit, but it pulled his pants tight, trapping his erection painfully against his leg. He moaned and tilted forward, leaning his forehead against the back of the couch and biting at the juncture of Bane's shoulder as he fumbled to unfasten his pants. Bane's hands were huge and, as soon as John got his zipper all the way down, they wasted no time in pulling his underwear and jeans as far down as they would go, grabbing at his ass and slipping between his legs to feel the soft skin of his inner thighs.

John's erection slapped against his stomach as soon as it was released and he moaned again, biting down harder on the thick muscle in Bane's shoulder as he worked on Bane's belt and fly. He got it open and then pulled back to lick his palm, bringing their erections together and stroking, panting into Bane's mouth. Bane felt huge in his hand, long and thick and uncut and there was no way his hand was going to fit around the both of them together. He leaned back to spit in his palm again and then concentrated on just the feel of Bane, hot and hard in his hand, and soft and warm against his tongue as they kissed.

It felt so good. His nerves were on fire and he was sweating. He could feel everywhere that Bane was touching him and knew that he was being wanton and slutty, rubbing himself off on Bane, panting and moaning and making a mess of himself, but he didn't want to stop. He rubbed his thumb over the head of Bane's cock and thrust his own against it, chewing at Bane's bottom lip and groaning out, "Patrick," like it was a magic word, over and over until Bane was shuddering and convulsing under him, coming like an earthquake. John road it, stroking him through it and panting against his cheek.

Bane relaxed for a moment, breathing hard as he came down from his organsm, then he hauled John up by the hips, drawing him forward as he slid himself down lower on the couch. John watched with wide eyes as Bane took him into his mouth. He arched his back, chasing the wet heat, his fingers tangling themselves in Bane's short hair as Bane sucked him all the way to the back of his throat, his fingers digging into the globes of John's ass, prodding him on, demanding.

John had just enough presence of mind to hope that Bane didn't have many neighbors. He would challenge anyone to keep their voice down while they were fucking that beautiful mouth.

It didn't take long before his eyes were rolling back in his head and he was coming in great gasps down Bane's throat. He collapsed back onto his thighs, clutching at Bane's collar to stay upright.

Bane was wrecked. John was probably wrecked too, but he could see that Bane was wrecked. Bane's eyes were half closed, mostly glazed over and watering. His mouth was swollen, pink, puffy and bitten, and his chin was obscenely wet, smeared with saliva and come. He had a massive hickey forming on the juncture of his neck and shoulder and his collar had been stretched and pulled, probably permanently out of shape. His chest was heaving as he breathed and there was a pool of his own come drying on his shirt.

John licked his lips.

_I did that. That was me. I fucked the brains out of Patrick "Bane" Banor._

He wanted to kiss that beautiful mouth again and was considering whether or not that would be allowed, when Bane shifted, wiping some of the mess off his face with the heel of his hand. There was something mundane and sobering about the way he did it that cut through John's endorphin haze and made him feel suddenly awkward, sitting on Bane's lap with his dick out and his come dripping down Bane's chin.

He rolled off, pulling up his pants and tucking himself back in. There was a tissue box on the side table and he grabbed one to clean himself up with before handing the box to Bane.

"Thanks." Bane's voice was deeper than usual, rougher. It made something flip, low in John's stomach, and he knew he would be jerking off to the memory of that voice, fucked hoarse, raw from John's dick down his throat.

_Goddamn._

He would have to leave before it got awkward, more awkward, but if Bane would talk just a little bit more, just one sentence, maybe, John was pretty sure he would never need to watch porn again in his life.

Preoccupied with cleaning himself up and contemplating his next move, John startled when the sound system sprung to life in front of him. Bane handed him back his beer as the movie started and he accepted it automatically, it was still mostly cold. He took a drink.

Bane pulled off his henley, glancing at the stain on the front and then using the back of it to wipe off his face, before throwing it to the side and relaxing back into the couch in just his white undershirt. He must have fastened his pants up at some point when John wasn't paying attention. Looking fucked out and relaxed, he took a sip of his beer before sliding his eyes over to John.

John looked quickly over at the TV screen, then down at the beer in his hand and over at Bane again. It was a good movie and it seemed a shame to waste an already opened beer.

He let himself sink slowly back into the couch.

"Be warned, I have terrible movie watching etiquette. If you're one of those people who requires total silence to enjoy a film, you might want to kick me out now."

"Hm..." Bane rumbled deep in the back of his throat and John felt his stomach flip again. "Somehow, I think I'll survive."

~~~~~

John had intended on leaving right after the movie was over, or maybe waiting until the movie was over, going for round two, and then leaving. Unfortunately, what he had told Bane earlier about being tired had not been nearly as much of a lie as he might have liked. Between that, the beer, and the best blow job of his life, he barely made it twenty minutes before he was nodding off on the couch and then who was he to refuse a soft, warm bed? He assumed Bane must have slept next to him, the bed was big enough and it would have been weirder if he hadn't, but after he had slipped out of his pants and under the covers, a flash bomb could have gone off next to him and he really wouldn't have noticed.

He woke up alone to the smell of coffee and toast wafting in from the kitchen, through the open bedroom door. It was still dark out, but that wasn't surprising, considering it was winter in Canada. He groaned and sat up, rubbing his eyes and fishing his jeans off the floor to pull out his phone and check the time: five thirty. He had a solid two hours to get himself sorted.

He pulled his pants on and wandered out into the kitchen, scrubbing his hands through his tangled hair and stretching.

"What time do your practices start that you have to get up at five in the morning? I thought seven thirty was bad enough, but this is just fucking ridiculous."

Bane turned from where he was standing over by the oven. "I'm meeting up with the coaching staff before practice for a post-game analysis. Coach Rayes is retiring next year and I'm taking over for him."

"Really? That's cool. Aren't you still under contract with the Wild, though?" John yawned loudly, cracking his jaw. He made to rub the sleep out of his eye, then stopped when he felt himself pressing into the still-healing bruise.

"I'm taking a buyout at the beginning of next season," Bane explained.

"Why?"

John tended to be a little blunt and a lot slow on the uptake before his morning coffee. He continued to stare at Bane blearily, scratching at his morning stubble and wishing he had access to a toothbrush.

Bane didn't seem to mind, though, the staring or the slowness. The bastard was fully dressed: shaved, combed and generally way more put together than he had any right to be, in John's opinion. He smiled at John, pushing a cup of coffee into his hands and steering him towards a seat at the kitchen table.

"I had a couple bad concussions last year, they're taking longer and longer to recover from. Even without the lockout, this was going to be my last year playing. But then the Assassins contacted me and I talked to the LNAH board. They're trying to change the direction of the league, cut back on the fighting." He shrugged, pulling a plate out of the cupboard and going back over to the stove. "It seemed worth looking into."

"Oh. Okay. That makes sense." John nodded along, sipping his coffee and starting to feel a little more lucid. He ran a hand through his hair again, then put down his mug. "You're probably on your way out the door then. Give me a second to find my socks and I'll get out of your way."

"Sit down, John, drink your coffee." Bane clicked off the stove and walked over to him, setting a plate down on the table.

"Um..." John paused in the act of pushing himself to his feet.

He looked down. Two fried eggs and two pieces of whole wheat toast on a chipped blue and white ceramic plate: an egg sandwich. Bane had made him an egg sandwich. He looked up again.

Bane reached out to cradle John's face in one hand, rubbing his thumb lightly over the faded bruises around John's eye, then leaned down to kiss the surgery scars that stood out, shiny and pink, against his cheek. He kissed his mouth. Bane's lips were just as soft and gentle as they had been the night before and John felt his eyes flutter closed and his face tilt up in response.

It was much too brief.

Bane pulled back, running a hand through John's tangled hair and kissing his temple as he straightened.

"Stay as long as you want. I have to go, but there are towels under the sink in the bathroom and razors and an extra toothbrush in the medicine cabinet, if you want a shower. Just remember to throw the deadbolt when you leave."

He put a key down on the kitchen table next to John's breakfast, kissed him again, then walked towards the front door, shrugging into his coat, slipping on his boots and shouldering his gear bag, as he made to leave.

John stared after him, momentarily dazed, before shaking his head and calling out at the last second, "What do you want me to do with the key after I lock up?"

Bane turned back, giving John a puzzled look. "Keep it." Then he closed the door and was gone.

John took a slow sip of coffee, rubbing his bare feet together under the table and looking down at the key on the table next to him. He could hear Bane starting his car outside and the scrape scrape scrape of him removing the ice from his windows.

_This feels exactly nothing like a one night stand._

He bit his lip cautiously and put the key in his pocket as he listened to Bane driving away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 3 Goal Lead. Sooo... bad hockey jokes for the win. Yes, I made the title of my entire chapter the punchline of a bad joke. Sue me. If anyone missed it. The Chiefs were up 3-0 at the end of the first period, then they blew their three goal lead and were only up by one before losing in overtime. Get it?
> 
> 4-H is more of an American thing than a Canadian thing but... whatever. 4-H is a organization where kids basically learn how to be farmers. You learn things like how to raise a cow or a sheep or how to can vegetables and it all generally culminates when you and the rest of your 4-H group bring your animals to the county fair. This is all about commercial farming and ranching, not raising a pet, the animals typically get sold and slaughtered. There's more to it than that, but you get the idea. Basically John is calling Bane a sheep-fucker. Yeah, my jokes are bad, I know.
> 
> So, maybe this is obvious, by I'm thinking maybe it's not: a "chirp" is another word for a heckle, it's a really common term in the hockey world but I've never heard it used in any other sport (to my ears, it sounds kinda dumb, but that's really what they call it). So Bane saying that John likes to chirp is... both appropriate and a terrible pun.
> 
> Slap Shot is a 1977 Paul Newman movie about a minor league hockey team. It’s super good, I highly recommend. I laugh out loud every time I see it.
> 
> Coach Rayes is supposed to be a reference to Ra's al Ghul, but I'd already used Ghul as Damian's last name and just calling him Ra's seemed kinda confusing because it looks like a possessive -_-. This isn't important, but it's what I did, okay?


	5. The Plus/Minus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have the best beta reader in the whole world!!! Go check out [MargaretKire](http://archiveofourown.org/users/MargaretKire/pseuds/MargaretKire/) ([mothdustmouth](https://mothdustmouth.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr) she is the greatest :)))))
> 
> I hope you all like this chapter, /sigh/ I always have big plans to write early in the week and go through a million edits and drafts before I post buuut, that just hasn't been happening lately.

  
  
John yawned and stretched, rolling over in bed to watch Bane button up his pants and slip a shirt on, over his head, before picking up his phone from off the bedside table and glancing at the time.  He groaned and reburied his face in his pillow.  Trust Bane to be up at 6:00 am on a Saturday.  
  
"Do you seriously have morning practice on a gameday?"    
  
It had been exactly three weeks since their first time together in Bane's apartment and surprisingly little had changed between them.  They still met up at the Donut Nook after morning practice almost every day, shared a newspaper and bickered back and forth over coffee.  They still followed each other's games, but pretended that they didn't, and John still had no idea what the fuck it was that they were doing.  Only now, they would also occasionally text and sometimes Bane would come over in the evening to watch an AHL game or play NHL 14 on John's PS3.  They would talk and drink beer and fuck and it was always good, relaxing and easy in a way that made John reluctant to trust it.  
  
They hadn't been back to Bane's place since that first time.  Bane had extended the invitation more than once, but John always found a reason to avoid it and Bane didn't push.  John liked being in his own space.  He felt more secure there, in control.  He liked that Bane was welcome to leave at any time and that he had the power to tell Bane to get the fuck out if he wanted to.  He never did, but it felt nice, knowing he had the option.  
  
Bane stayed the night most of the time, slipping out in the early hours to get to morning practice and John had gotten somewhat used to waking up to him rustling around in the dark for his clothes.  It felt nice to have something like a routine with another person, domestic in a way that was equal parts confusing and terrifying, especially considering that John hadn't even let Bane fuck him yet.  That was another thing Bane never pushed on and, as a result, the sleeping together part often involved a disturbing amount of actual sleep, which, to be totally honest, was probably why they were still doing it.  Anyone who got between John and his prerequisite ten hours of shuteye could go take a flying leap.  
  
John felt the bed dip and then the soft press of Bane's lips on his temple.  He smiled and rolled over towards him, dragged Bane down onto the bed and pulled him in for a kiss.  He wasn't sure he would ever get over how soft Bane's lips were, how gentle, sometimes so gentle it hurt.  Bane cradled the back of his head and kissed him slowly, then carefully untangled himself from John's arms and stepped back.  
  
John watched him unplug his phone from the wall, turning it off silent and checking for new messages.  He had never seen Bane get ready before a game.  It would be very like him to have an exacting game day routine.  
  
John closed his eyes and tried not to think about how this might be the only time he got to see it.  
  
It was March.  Tonight was the last game of the regular season and, win or lose, the Assassins were going to the playoffs and the Nighthawks were not.  They hadn't talked about what happened next, but after tonight's game there would be no more reason for John to stay in the area.  
  
John wouldn't think about that right now.  "Sneaking out before you're caught consorting with the enemy?"  
  
He could hear the teasing smile in Bane's voice.  "Something like that."  
  
"Hmm... probably for the best.  I should go for a run, JC'll be here around noon and," he stretched out his arms and yawned, "he'll probably want to tape some shit for the channel, you know, ask me how I plan on celebrating destroying the Assassins' winning streak, things like that."  
  
Bane snorted, sitting back down on the bed and running his hand lightly over John's side and through his hair.  "Awfully sure of that, are you, Little Birld?"  
  
"Mmhmm.  The power of positive thinking: it's kind of like praying, but more reliable."  
  
"'How do you know you're God?'"  Bane recited quietly.  
  
"'When I pray to Him, I find I am talking to myself.'"  
  
"I'm impressed."  Bane sounded surprised.  
  
"Don't be, I only ever saw the movie."  
  
Bane laughed and leaned down to kiss him again.  
  
"Are you going to fight Wayne tonight?"  John asked, after a minute.  He could feel Bane stand up, ready to leave this time.  
  
"If he wants me to."  
  
John breathed out slowly through his nose, then back in again, feeling his diaphragm expand against his ribs.  "I think he's going to want to."  
  
"Then, yes, I will fight him."  
  
John sighed and burrowed down further under the covers.  Telling Bane to be careful seemed hypocritical, so he left it at that.  They would see each other at the game tonight and whatever was going to happen would happen.  
  
~~~~~  
  
John sat, fingering the A that had been recently sewn onto his jersey.  He was on the bench, but that was fine, he wasn't first line and never had been, but he was, as of this game, an assistant captain.  Coach Fox had decided that Harvey wasn't quite even-keeled enough to lead the team, and had promoted Bruce instead, making Harvey one assistant and, in an announcement just before the start of the game, John the other.  He said he trying something new.  It felt like a test.  
  
It was going better than expected.  They were fifteen minutes into the first period and the Assassins had just scored the first goal of the game.  Both sides had kept things pretty clean and there had been no fights so far, though John could feel the tension every time Bane and Bruce came within a stick's length of each other.  The Assassins had the better offense, but the Nighthawks had been doing a pretty good job of keeping it contained.  It was going to be a close game.  
  
Both teams lined up around the center circle for the puck drop, Bruce and Bane stood shoulder to shoulder.  John could see them talking and he leaned forward on the bench, trying to hear, but they were too far away.  
  
_Don't do it, Bruce.  Don't fucking do it._  
  
The puck dropped and Bruce and Bane squared off.  The crowd roared.  This is what they had come to see.  
  
"Goddamit, Wayne, what the fuck are you doing!" Coach Fox yelled over the side of the barrier.  
  
It didn't matter, the gloves were off.  Bruce had something to prove.  
  
_BAM!_  
  
Bane made contact first, throwing a punch that glanced of Bruce's chin, knocking his helmet off.  They had each other by the front of the jersey.  Bane's reach was slightly longer, but Bruce was shaking him, trying to get him off balance.  That anyone could shake Bane and get him to move at all seemed impossible, but that was what Bruce was doing.  
  
He took a few more glancing blows from Bane.  
  
_BAM!  BAM!  BAM!_  
  
Bruce kept his stance wide, his arm cocked back, waiting for an opening, shaking Bane with his left, keeping him off balance.  
  
_BAM! BAM! BAM!_  
  
He delivered three strong hits of his own before Bane twisted around to deliver a blow to Bruce's side.  It had probably cracked some ribs, but Bruce barely even flinched.  He had been waiting for that, for Bane to go in for a body shot, for him to lower his shoulders as he delivered it.  
  
_BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!_  
  
That split second opening was all that Bruce needed.  Each one of his punches connected.  The fourth one opened a cut on Bane's temple and the fifth one snapped his head back like it was on a hinge.  John felt all his blood run cold in his veins.  
  
Then the linesmen pulled them apart, dragging them off towards opposite penalty boxes.  
  
Bane was steady on his feet.  A teammate handed him his stick.  His gloves were cleared off the ice.  Bane had been in hundreds of fights since the beginning of his career.  Hundreds of fights, with very few injuries.  Very few reported injuries.  Very few injuries that kept him from playing.  He sat in the penalty box, dabbing at the blood that was dripping down his face.  
  
John turned away, he wasn't going to watch.  There was nothing he could do.  
  
~~~~~  
  
Five minutes later, the buzzer sounded the end of the first period and both teams filed off the ice, into their respective dressing rooms.  Coach Fox marched in behind the Nighthawks.  
  
"What the fuck were you thinking out there, Wayne?!  This isn't the playground, settle your personal grudges on your own goddamn time, I'm about to strip that fucking C right off your goddam jersey, so help me!  Blake!"  
  
"Yes, Coach!"  
  
"I'm switching the lineup, you're going in as left A wing with the first shift and I don't give a damn if Wayne is on the ice or not, you're acting team captain, understood?"  
  
"Yes, Coach!"  
  
"I said," Coach Fox's eyes swept across the rest of the team, "is that fucking understood?!"  
  
"Yes, Coach!"  The team answered in unison.  
  
John caught Bruce's eye as Coach Fox moved on to talk strategy going into the next period.   Bruce nodded at him.  He didn't even look chagrined at having lost his position, he probably didn't care.  
  
_Fucking asshole._  
  
John faced forward again.  
  
_I'm going to be the best goddamn captain this team has ever goddamn seen and we're going to win this goddamn hockey game if I have to shove that fucking puck up Bruce Wayne's smug fucking ass and push him backwards through the fucking goal._  
  
~~~~~  
  
The clean hockey and good sportsmanship of the first period were nowhere to be found in the second or the third.  
  
John told Harvey Dent to win the faceoff and then stick to Damian like a wart on his ass, "If anyone so much as thinks about touching him, I want you breathing down their neck so hard they think they're in a wind-tunnel."  
  
The Assassins won the faceoff.  John did not take well to his instructions being ignored.

Their center had already passed the puck away, but John rammed right into him anyways, knocking him flat on his back.  The man yardsaled across the ice, losing his gloves and his stick, looking dazed when he finally struggled to his feet again.  
  
That started the second fight of the day and pretty much set the tone for the rest of the game.  There were four fights in the second period and another three in the third.  Harvey was tossed out after his third major penalty and Bruce right after him.  Even Damian got into a fight.  It was a surprise that no one ended the game with a suspension.  
  
By the time the last buzzer sounded, there was blood in John's mouth and adrenaline running hot in his veins.  He hadn't looked at the scoreboard in what felt like forever and could barely hear anything over the sound of his own heartbeat and the rush of blood in his ears.  
  
He was vaguely aware of cheering.  
  
The game was over and there was cheering.  
  
His team was cheering.  
  
He caught sight of JC going crazy in the stands, then looked up at the scoreboard, staggering as Damian lept onto his back.  
  
_Home: 2    Away: 1_  
  
That was good, wasn't it?  They were home.  
  
He looked around the stadium, just to be sure, then back up at the scoreboard.  
  
_Home: 2    Away: 1_

Damian was yelling something in his ear.

_We won._

~~~~~  
  
John texted Bane from the dressing room.  
  
**_u doing ok, hotshot?_**  
  
Bane hadn't come back after the end of the first period and John hadn't allowed himself to think about it other than to be relieved.  
  
The second and third periods had been a bloodbath and he no longer liked to watch Bane fight and he definitely didn't want to fight him.  Things were different now.  He would probably be able to hit Bane, if he needed to, but he wasn't sure he would be able to forgive Bane, if he had hit him back.  
  
That was just the way it was.  
  
He showered quickly and changed back into his street cloths, then checked his phone again.  He had a few messages from JC and a couple from his old teammates in Ontario, but nothing from Bane.  He sent off another text.  
  
**_that was a pretty hard hit, just let me know if you're alright_**  
  
He chewed on his lip, watching his phone as he packed up.  It stayed silent.  The rest of the team was celebrating, but he brushed them off, ignoring their invitations and rushing out the changing room door, toward the away team exit.  
  
The first Assassins player he recognized coming out, he walked right up to.  
  
"Hey, is Patrick doing okay?"  
  
The player gave him a confused look.  "Who?"  
  
"Patrick Banor.  Bane.  He disappeared after the first period and I can't get ahold of him, is he okay?"  
  
"Oh, Bane.  Uh, yeah."  The man seemed a bit confused, maybe unsure if this was information he should be sharing or not.  "He went home."  
  
"When?  Just now?"  
  
"No, probably sometime during the second period."  
  
"Why?  You said he was okay."  
  
"Hey, dude, all I know is, he's not here.  He left."  The guy raised one hand in the universal sign of: back off.  
  
"Yeah, okay.  Thanks."  John backed off.  
  
JC would be pissed as hell at John for ditching him, but John had already given him a spare key to the apartment and introduced him to the team.  JC would be fine on his own.  
  
Meanwhile, all John could think about was Bane.  Bane and Derek Boogaard.  Derek Boogaard, who had played for years with Bane on the Minnesota Wild.  Derek Boogaard, who had been twenty-eight and recovering from a concussion when he had died in his sleep in his Minneapolis apartment.  Derek Boogaard, who had been found the next morning by his brother and was the real reason Bane was so damn paranoid about concussions.  
  
He texted JC.  
  
**_the team is going out to Charlie B's, I might be late.  Don't wait_**  
  
Rushing out to his car, he felt his phone buzz in his pocket and pulled it out to check.  
  
**Seriously??!!!  DUDE!!**  
  
He started his car, not bothering to answer.  
  
The light was on in the kitchen when John let himself into Bane's apartment fifteen minutes later.  He walked through the dark living room towards it, stopping in the doorway.  Bane was seated at the kitchen table with a half-empty pot of coffee next to him.  He had changed into sweatpants and a ratty flannel shirt, but it didn't look like he had taken a shower.  There was blood crusted around his hairline and by his ear.  The cut on his forehead had been bandaged and the skin around it was tinted brown from iodine.  He looked exhausted.  
  
"Are you okay?"  John had been so focused on getting to Bane that, now that he was there, he felt somewhat at a loss for what to do.  
  
Bane smiled tiredly at him from across the table.  "I have whiplash."  
  
John tilted his head in question and Bane sighed, looking down and rubbing at the back of his neck.  "It's not a concussion.  My neck snapped back hard enough it actually gave me whiplash."  
  
John nodded, letting out a slow breath, then walked decisively into the kitchen, grabbing a towel off the counter, running it under the faucet and throwing it in the microwave for thirty seconds.  It was steaming when it came out and Bane must have not had the energy to ask what John was doing, because he just waited, watching with slightly amused eyes as John folded the cloth and walked over to him.   He stepped right into Bane's space, standing between his legs, as he draped the hot compress around his neck.  
  
He ran his hands through Bane's hair, cradling his head like it was something precious and feeling the planes of his skull.  It was something Bane liked to do to him and he was starting to think he might understand why.  
  
"You shouldn't have given me a key."  John's voice was loud in the quiet room.  "This is what happens.  I showed up unannounced and now I'm being all weird at you."  
  
Bane sighed and didn't say anything, letting his head fall forward to rest against John's chest.  
  
They stayed like that, just breathing together and not saying anything, until the cloth around Bane's neck started to cool.  John took it off, setting it down on the table and running his hands over the tight muscles.  
  
"A bath would probably help."  
  
Bane didn't respond other than to lean further into John's chest and fingers.  
  
"I'll run you a bath."  John pulled away abruptly and left the kitchen, towards the bathroom.  
  
Turning on both taps, he dug around under the sink to see what he could find as far as toiletries.  There was a dusty bag of bath salts in the back of the cabinet that looked like it had been purchased at Bed Bath and Beyond sometime in the late 90s.  
  
"That was here when I moved in."  
  
John looked up to see Bane leaning against the door-frame, watching him.  He shrugged and ripped open the top of the package, dumping it into the steaming bath water and swishing it around with his hand.  He adjusted the taps again.  
  
"You don't have to do this."  
  
It was loud in the bathroom with the water running, but Bane's voice always seemed to carry, no matter the circumstances.  John wiped his hands off on a towel.  He looked up at Bane again.  Bane was still leaning against the door-frame.  Bane never leaned.  
  
"Just..."  John scrubbed at his forehead with the heel of his hand.  The stress and tension of the last few hours were starting to get to him.  He felt drained.  "Just let me do this, okay?  Please?"  He wanted to do this.  It was for him, just as much as it was for Bane.  He just didn't have the energy to talk about why.  
  
Bane seemed to understand.  He nodded and started stripping out of his clothes, then stepped into the tub, leaning back and closing his eyes as it filled.  John quickly toed out of his shoes and took off his socks and pants, rolling up his shirtsleeves.  He sat behind Bane on the edge of the tub with his feet in the water, running his hands over Bane's neck and shoulders.  Filling a plastic cup with water, John poured it over Bane's hair, then took a dime-sized drop of shampoo and began working it into Bane's scalp, careful to avoid the bandage at his hairline, massaging the dried blood away from behind his ears.  
  
He took his time rinsing, allowing the suds to slosh off, down Bane's back and shoulders, avoiding his face.  The bathtub was full by the time he was finished.  He turned off the taps.  
  
"Here, sit up."  Bane eased forward till he was resting his chest against his knees.  The bathtub wasn't small, but it looked that way, filled with Bane.  
  
He lathered up a washcloth and ran it over Bane's neck, across his broad shoulders and down his back, following the lines of the muscles, then rinsed the soap away and repeated.  He took his time, feeling the curves and planes of Bane's back, reassuring himself with the warmth of Bane's skin.  
  
The water was hazy with soapy by the time John guided Bane back again, to lean against the end of the tub, so he could wash his chest.  Bane tilted his head back and closed his eyes, sinking further and further into the water, as John touched him.  His chest was smooth and strong, his nipples had pebbled up, despite the heat of the room and he was hard, under the water.  John dropped the washcloth to trace the lines of Bane's chest with his fingers.  He really was a beautiful man.  
  
Bane opened his eyes to look up at him and it hit John all at once, how completely vulnerable Bane was allowing himself to be in that moment, naked and hard and laid out in front of him, watching John and being there for him.  
  
John stood up abruptly and got out of the tub, drying off his legs and laying down a towel for Bane to stand on, drawing him out of the tub as well.  He wrapped Bane up in the biggest, softest towel he could find, throwing another one over his head with which to dry his short hair, then pulled him forward into a kiss.  He put everything into that kiss, all the things he didn't know how or wasn't ready to say: how scared he had been, how relieved he was now, how nervous he felt for the future.  
  
He pulled away.  "Bed."  
  
Bane nodded and finished drying off, then followed John into the bedroom, pulling back the covers and climbing into bed as John stripped out of the last of his clothes.  
  
He tried to sit up as John climbed on top of him, but John pressed him back down against the pillows, straddling him and kissing him softly, running his hands across Bane's shoulders and down his arms.  Bane seemed to get the message.  
  
Bane was so beautiful.  So beautiful and so gentle and so soft.  So soft it felt like a secret.  
  
John kissed his way down Bane's neck, across his shoulder and down his broad chest, licking at the curves of his collar bones and down his ribs as he insinuated himself between Bane's legs, lifting up onto his knees.  
  
Bane was big to the point of being intimidating and he must have known this, but he still never pushed.  He never asked, or implied or hinted after anything that John did not volunteer for, so, even though they had been sort-of dating for something like three weeks, when John bent his head down to carefully trace the length of Bane's cock with his tongue, it was for the first time.  Bane let out a long, steady breath.  
  
John did not like to give head and generally succeeded in avoiding having to do it.  He hated the idea of being on his knees in front of anyone.  He hated having something down his throat cutting off his air supply.  He hated feeling vulnerable with someone's hands in his hair, controlling and demanding.  It wasn't trauma, he hadn't had any bad experiences with it, or at least no more than most, it was just something he knew about himself.  He hated giving head.  
  
Bane, however, seemed to be the exception to a lot of things.  
  
He breathed over Bane's dick and it jumped against his stomach.  It was big, like the rest of Bane, and John had had his hands on it enough to know just how big.  John looked up to where Bane was watching him.  Bane was like a mountain, miles and miles of hard muscle.  John had seen him fight and knew, first hand, the violence and brutality that he was capable of.  There were metal screws in John's face because of Bane.  One punch was all it had taken.  But somehow, here, like this, John never felt more safe.  
  
Whatever happened next, Bane would never hurt him.  John could do anything he wanted or nothing at all and Bane would still be lying there, trusting him.  
  
He lowered his head again and licked, feeling the vein pulse against his tongue, then took the head into his mouth and sucked at it.  The muscles in Bane's thighs flexed under his fingers and he could hear Bane panting above him and that, in itself, was its own rush.  Bane was so strong and so big and so powerful, but he could also be weak and hurt and tired and so, so vulnerable and John could do this for him.  John could take care of him.  
  
He took Bane as deep as he could, listening to Bane gasp and groan above him as he hollowed his cheeks.  The sound of it made him ache.  He moaned around the dick in his mouth, widening his stance and rocking his hips into the empty air.  He wanted Bane to touch him.  He wanted it so suddenly and so badly that his skin itched and he was starting to shake with the need for it.  He held Bane by the hips and fucked himself down onto Bane's cock until he could hardly breathe.  He felt empty.  He wanted Bane to touch him and hold him and fuck him and never let him go.  Bane was hard and thick in the back of his throat and John wished it was between his legs, but this was good too.  He tried to get a hand on himself for some relief, but he couldn't balance, so instead he just shuddered and sucked and drooled around Bane's cock until Bane was bucking under him in involuntary tremors and coming hot and bitter, in John's mouth.  
  
He tried to swallow, but the taste made him gag, so he leaned over to grab his underwear off the floor and spit into it, then leaned his head against Bane's hip, jaw sore and eyes watering, as he stroked himself off.  Bane ran his hands slowly across John's shoulders and down his back.  It felt like a balm on his overheated skin and Bane was probably offered him more, but John was already coming, catching the mess in his soiled boxer briefs and collapsing onto his side.

They had both been quick.  John didn't care.  He was tired.  
  
He might have been content to lie there indefinitely, the chill of the room keeping him awake until he felt level-headed enough make it to the bathroom, but Bane pulled him up and into this arms.  He smoothed back John's hair, kissing him softly and pulling the blankets up, around his shoulders, so that he felt warm and contented and not in the least like leaving.  
  
Closing his eyes, John let his hands wander across Bane's chest.  He sighed and leaned over to kiss Bane's neck, before starting to extract himself from the tangle of Bane's limbs.  Bane growling softly in protest.

John kissed the corner of his mouth.  "I have to turn off the light in the bathroom and tell JC where I am before he calls in the Mounties."  
  
Bane nodded, appeased.  He looked half asleep already, his eyes heavy and and breathing even.  He squeezed John's arm lightly, then released him, letting him slip away.  
  
As John stepped into the bathroom again, draining the bathtub and cleaning the wet towels off the floor, it occurred to him that he could just as easily leave.  No one needed him to stay, Bane would be fine.  
  
He brushed his teeth with Bane's spare toothbrush as he thought about it, picking his jeans up off the floor and shooting a text off to JC, then went back to the bedroom, pulling back the covers and climbing in next to Bane.  It was nice, having the option.  
  
~~~~~  
  
The room was still mostly dark when John woke up.  Some light shone in from the open door, along with the smell of coffee and sounds of breakfast being prepared in the next room.  It was much the same as the first morning John had woken up in Bane's bedroom.  
  
Except that this time John was naked.  
  
He dug around on the floor for his clothes.  His underwear was beyond saving, but he had had the foresight to bring his jeans in from the bathroom before getting into bed, so he slipped those on along with his undershirt, before venturing out into the kitchen.  
  
Bane was standing by the stove again and turned as he came in.  John smiled, hopping up onto the counter-top next to him as Bane put his spatula down and pulled him in for a kiss.  
  
"Good morning, Little Bird."  Bane ducked his head down to kiss the tattoo on John's hip, rubbing his thumb across it and smiling teasingly up at him.  "Or does this make you Batman?"  
  
John made a face.  "Is that your way of telling me I'm a grump?"  
  
"No."  Bane smirked a little wider and leaned up to kiss John's neck and nuzzle his jaw.  "I like Little Bird better anyway, or maybe Robin."  He trailed his hand down John's chest.  "My little Robin."  
  
"Hmm..."  John let his head rest on Bane's shoulder.  "I hope you know, you're the only one who can get away with saying shit like that to me."  
  
"I know."  Bane smiled again and pulled away, pressing a cup of coffee into John's hands and turning his attention back to the stove.  
  
"Sunnyside up for me, please, if it's all the same."  
  
Bane nodded, cracking two more eggs into the pan.  
  
"So, the Assassins are going into the postseason."  
  
Bane nodded again.  "Three weeks of post-season, then I go back to Minnesota to negotiate the buyout, before moving out here permanently."  He turned down the heat a little on the stove.  "I'll have to change apartments, this is player housing."  
  
John tapped his heels against the cupboards below him, chewing at his cheek and looking out across the kitchen.  "I think the Nighthawks might offer me a contract for next year.  Being made alternate captain was a pretty good sign, anyways."  
  
"Don't take it."  
  
"What?"  The bottom dropped out of John's stomach.  He turned to Bane, wondering if he had heard wrong.  
  
Bane didn't look up, just poked at the frying pan with his spatula, frowning.  "I have money, so you shouldn't worry about that and I'll come to you, wherever you are, whatever league you play in, but, don't play in this one.  Don't keep doing this."  He turned off the stove and took the pan off the burner.  
  
"You're not Bobby Orr.  I know that you know that and you play your heart out every game anyway, which I love.  But," he sighed, finally turning to face John, "playing like that, in this league, it's gonna get you killed."  
  
John dropped down off the counter and pushed away from it, folding his arms over his chest.  "Oh, so it's perfectly fine for you to fight your way across the entire Northern Hemisphere, but I'm just too delicate, is that it?  Whatever happened to what you said about 'changing the way the game is played?'  Maybe I like this league, maybe I want to be a part of changing it.  Maybe I fucking hate how we won last night.  You missed it, it was a fucking disgrace to hockey.  I hate that that shit like that is even allowed to fucking happen."  
  
"John..."  
  
"Don't 'John' me, Patrick.  I thought I was your Baby Bird?  That should have been my first clue that you'd want to start treating me like a fucking infant."  
  
"That's not what I meant."  
  
"Oh, then what did you mean?  Because all I heard was you telling me that I'm not allowed to play with the big kids."  
  
"I love you."  Bane looked like he wanted to reach out for John, but stopped himself, letting his hands drop to his sides again.  "I love you and you barely break a buck fifty and when I see you take on heavyweights twice your size, it scares me.  It scares me like nothing else does.  That's all I meant.  I love you, and I don't want you to get hurt because it scares me."  
  
Even when John yelled at him, Bane never raised his voice, never stepped away from the stove.  He kept his hands at his sides and his shoulders lowered, looking at John with his soft grey eyes and waiting to say his piece, never pushing.  He never pushed, never tried to intimidate, never interrupted, just listened and said his piece.  
  
And loved John.  
  
It took all the heat out of John's anger.  He sat down heavily at the kitchen table and put his forehead in his hands, running his hands through his hair.  "You scared me last night too, you know.  You didn't answer my texts and you weren't at the rink anymore.  No one could tell me if you were okay or not."  
  
"I'm sorry, I left my phone in the car when I came in.  I didn't mean to worry you, I thought you would be busy with your team."  
  
John sighed.  "Yeah, I kinda did too."  He rubbed at his eyes, then sat up.  "I want this to work, I want us to date and you to be my boyfriend and for this to be a thing."  
  
He paused and waited until Bane took his cue and nodded.  "I want that too."  
  
"So: we compromise.  If, and that's a big if, if they offer me a contract with the Nightwings, I'll talk with Coach Fox about it.  If they want me as some midget-sized novelty enforcer, I'm done, I'll find something else, but if they want to bring me on to help Bruce lead the offense, I'm gonna say yes.  I want to do it and I think I could be good at it."  
  
He raised his eyebrows at Bane expectantly and Bane slowly nodded.  
  
"If they don't offer me a contract, I'm not doing long-distance for the entire length of the hockey season and if you're coaching for the Assassins, there is no way you'll be able to make it down to Ontario even once, I don't care how rich you are, there just aren't that many hours in a day."  
  
Bane opened his mouth as if to speak, but John hurried onward, looking away and scratching at the side of his nose self-consciously.  "So I'll look for something else.  There's probably at least some beer league around here that'll take me.  I used to ref a lot to make ends meet, I could start doing that again."  
  
He picked at his fingernails for a moment, then looked up.  "Does that sound okay to you?"  
  
Bane was smiling like someone had just told him Santa Claus was real and currently on his way, like he couldn't quite believe his luck but was too afraid to question it.  His hair was sticking up a bit on one side and his crooked teeth were showing, but he was nodding.  
  
It took John a second to realize that, left to his own devices, Bane would probably just keep smiling and nodding like that until the end of time, so he took it upon himself to stand up, smoothing his hand over Bane's mussed hair as he kissed his crooked teeth.  
  
Bane laughed, lifting John up into his arms and swinging him around so he was sitting on the counter again, with Bane standing between his legs and pressing his face into John's neck.  It tickled and made John laugh as well and he was just on the verge of saying something outrageously sappy when, his cell phone went off in his pocket.  
  
Bane pulled back just enough to allow John to answer.  
  
"Hello?"  
  
"Yo, John, just wondering if I need to send out search and rescue."  It was JC.  
  
"No, everything's good, sorry I bailed on you last night."  
  
"Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do.  I'll probably head back this afternoon, though, if you wanna grab lunch at some point."  
  
Glancing over at Bane, John raised his eyebrows questioningly.  Bane was close enough to have heard both sides of the conversation.  He smiled and shrugged his shoulders.  
  
John closed his eyes.  "Yeah, that sounds good.  How do you feel about me bringing my new boyfriend along?"  
  
"John, you dog, you've been holding out!  Fuck yeah I want to meet the boyfriend, he better follow hockey though, because you are not getting out of talking about that game last night.  I mean DUDE, that shit was epic."  
  
"Yeah," John sighed and leaned forward to rest his head against Bane's shoulder, "no worries there.  He definitely follows hockey."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A plus/minus rating (+/-) is a hockey statistic that measures a player's goal differential. Basically, if your team scores a goal while you were on the ice, that counts a +1. If the other team scores a goal while you were on the ice, that counts as -1. It's supposed to provide something of a holistic metric for a player's impact on the game. It was developed for use in hockey, but is now used in other sports as well.
> 
> The "How do you know you're God?" “When I pray to Him, I find I am talking to myself.” line is from _The Ruling Class_ by Peter Barnes, it's a great play and was turned into a movie starring Peter O'Toole. It's got nothing at all to do with hockey.
> 
> I guess I should have addressed this last chapter but: I don't have any idea how reasonable it would be for Bane to transition from NHL player to LNAH coach.
> 
> Derek Boogaard (the "Boogey Man") was an enforcer for the Minnesota Wild and later the NY Rangers. In 2011, at age 28, he was found dead in his apartment from an accidental drug and alcohol overdose while recovering from a concussion. An examination of his brain revealed he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE, basically severe brain damage caused by repeated minor head injuries).
> 
> Bobby Orr is widely considered to be one of the greatest hockey players to have ever lived. (It’s basically him, Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe.)


	6. Home-Ice Advantage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big shout-out to [MargaretKire](http://archiveofourown.org/users/MargaretKire/pseuds/MargaretKire/) ([mothdustmouth](https://mothdustmouth.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr) for being a huge supporter and wonderful beta reader!

  
  
John had a great ass.  It bounced.  Bane could watch John's ass all day long and never get bored.  If there was a special place in heaven reserved for Bane, it was probably situated directly behind John on a Stairmaster.  Bane loved John's ass.  
  
Well, Bane loved all of John, but that was really beside the point, and not news to anyone.  
John liked to lounge around his apartment after practice in loose sweatpants and stretched-out T-shirts and Bane had started leaving his old work-out clothes lying around in hopes that they would make it into the rotation.  They were much too big on John and hung off his hips like the beginning of a bad 80s porno, which should have been ridiculous and not sexy, but it drove Bane up the wall anyways and John knew it.  
  
It was a Sunday and John had just gotten off morning practice with the Nighthawks when Bane came over.  John was stretched out on the rug in front of the television, basking in a patch of sunlight coming through a crack in the curtains.  He had turned up the heat enough for it to be indulgently warm and his smile as he looked up at Bane was slow and languid.  
  
Bane was half-way surprised his head didn't explode.  He fell all over himself getting inside, closing the door behind him and throwing the deadbolt.  He changed his mind about the StairMaster, this was definitely what heaven looked like.  Hands down, no question, this was it.  
  
John was wearing a pair of Bane's old sweatpants and they were loose and ragged and hanging low on the curve of his ass, low enough to show that that was all he was wearing on his ass.  He shifted slightly, arching his back and pushing up onto his elbows.  His shirt had rucked up and Bane could see the dimples on his lower back and the dip of his spine and, dear Lord.  Bane had been trying not to notice because he felt like it might disappear if he looked at it directly, but John was wearing his jersey, Bane's old hockey jersey from the Minnesota Wild.  Bane had left it in John's closet in an act of blind optimism because John took his hockey very seriously and wouldn't be caught dead cheering for a team that wasn't the Montreal Canadians, even if he knew it would pretty much top any sex fantasy Bane had ever had since the beginning of time.  
  
John winked and stretched out his back in a way that made his hips tilt up in what Bane hoped with all his heart was an invitation.  "Well, Big Guy," he smirked and pulled out a bottle of lube that had been hiding behind the television remote next to him.  It rolled across the carpet, coming to a stop next to his hip.  "I recorded last night's game, you wanna watch it with me?"  
  
Bane ripped off his jacket and was on his knees with John's sweatpants pushed down and his hands cupping John’s ass before John had finished asking the question.  Jesus Christ, John's ass was so soft and round, Bane just wanted to bite it.  So he did.  He pulled John up onto his knees and sucked and bit and rubbed his beard all over John’s as until it was pink.  Being up on his knees made John's shirt fall forward even more and his sweatpants slip all the way down his thighs, showing off the skin of his back and his pale, slender legs.  Bane just wanted to touch him everywhere.  He ran his hands up John's chest and played with his hard nipples, then traced back down the line of his abdomen to feel between his legs, teasing at his erection and running his thumb over his perineum, making John buck forward and pant.  
  
A buzzer sounded, coming from the television.  Bane looked up, noticing for the first time that there really was a hockey game on.  John had been dead serious.  They were going to fuck and watch hockey and that might just be the most Canadian kink ever, which was really saying something since Bane's sister had dated a Mountie at one point, but John was wearing Bane's hockey jersey, which really just pushed this one over the line and Oh God...  
  
John sat back a little, grinding his ass into the erection straining Bane's pants and Bane stopped being able to think properly.  
  
He brought his hands back up to John's ass-cheeks and spread them, getting a look at the tight pink furl there.  It gleamed with slick.  Bane ran his thumb over it, massaging gently and pressing inside.  John groaned and leaned back into the pressure.  He had prepped himself.  He had come back from a three hour practice and washed and changed and prepped himself and put on a hockey game and Bane knew that a lot of that was because it made John hot and some of that was because John liked to be in control, even when he let himself go, but some of that, some of that Bane knew was for him.  Like the jersey, that was for Bane, and the lack of underwear, that was for Bane too.  John wasn't exactly the type to just let things hang, but he knew it made Bane crazy.  
  
Bane opened the tube of lubricant with his teeth and poured some on his fingers, messaging John's asscheek with one hand as he slowly pressed in with his middle finger.  It was warm, and tight and John took him so well, moaning and trying to thrust back against Bane's hand.  Bane wouldn't let him.  He loved being inside John, feeling his pulse and the smoothness of his inner walls, the heat of him.  He glanced up at the screen, they had two whole periods to go, Bane was not going to rush this.  
  
He pumped slowly in and out with his finger, allowing John to squirm against his hand, trying for a better angle, before adding another.  Bane smiled and leaned down to kiss John’s tailbone.  Twisting his fingers, he brushed his knuckles against John's prostate on the instroke, but only very lightly.  He could feel John clench around him, his hips shaking as he tried to get Bane to do it again.  John was kneading at the shag carpeting underneath him, sighing and letting out breathy moans as Bane worked him open.  Someone scored a goal on the television.  
  
Bane leaned down further, licking around his fingers.  John shuddered under him, his shoulders tensing and his forehead dripping to rest against the floor.  
  
"What's the score, Baby Bird?"  
  
"Uh... What?"  John panted and thrust his hips back against Bane's fingers.  
  
"The game.  You take me so well, Baby Bird, but I don't want to distract you from your game."  He slipped in a third finger and John cried out as Bane brushed over his prostate again.  He lifted his head.  
  
"It's... uhhh... second period and... 2-3 for... ohhh... for..."  Bane pulled out, then pushed back in with just one finger and started massaging John's prostate as he stuttered and sweated and writhed on the floor.  God, he was beautiful.  "For the Islanders but... fuck, Patrick, please."  
  
Bane loved this part.  John had probably never begged for a thing in his life, but sometimes, if he was turned on enough, and in the right kind of mood, and Bane really worked for it, he might be inclined to ask very very nicely for Bane's cock.  
  
"Please, Patrick... uhhh... please.  You know it's not live.  Minnesota wins... in the third, please."  
  
Bane unzipped his pants, pushing them down on his hips and letting his erection jump out, slapping against John's ass cheeks and making him jump and then sigh.  
  
He spread lube down the length of it and rubbed the head up and down against John's hole, letting it slip in a little more each time until John was desperately pushing back, almost sobbing, trying to get Bane to go deeper.  
  
"Shhh... it's okay, Baby Bird, I'll give you what you want."  Bane eased his hand down John's back, soothing him, then slowly pressed forward with his hips, sinking into John.  He watched himself be swallowed up by John's beautiful ass until the soft round cheeks of it were pressing, flush, with his hips.  He swatted at it and watched it bounce, felt it clench and shift around him.  "You're so good to me, Baby Bird, you're so perfect."  He ran both hands up John's back, along his spine and then back to his hips.  "Let's just stay like this, just like this, you're so good."  
  
"Okay.  Okay.  But, maybe, just a little, you could move."  
  
"Yeah, just a little."  Bane eased out very very slowly, and then rocked back in.  
  
John let out a deep groan.  "Yes... just like that.  Just like that."  
  
Minnesota scored a goal in the background.  
  
~~~~~  
  
Three hours later, they were back in the living room watching hockey again.  Bane had aired out the apartment a bit so it no longer smelled quite as much like sex and John had changed his clothes so Bane was able to think about three hundred percent more clearly.  John's friend, JC, was visiting from Quebec to give them an, "exclusive, sneak preview of the final version of the regular season Reel of Champions!"  Not to be confused with the final version of the postseason Reel of Champions, or the postseason including Stanley Cup Finals Reel of Champions.  There were, really, quite a lot of sneak previews to be had according to JC.  
  
Bane had met JC for the first time almost exactly a year before, when John had introduced them over French-dip sandwiches and afternoon coffee.  Bane had come out of that first encounter having learned three things: one, spit-takes were real things that happen to real people in real life, two, John's best friend was even less subtle than John, which was not at all, and, three, John had been following his career a hell of a lot more closely than he had previously admitted.  
  
John had spent the entire fifteen-minute drive over to the dinner, where they were meeting JC, silent and texting furiously, only finally turning to Bane once they had parked.  His expression had been so grave and deathly serious that it had given Bane a moment's pause.  Bane had spent a second wondering if John might be having second thoughts, before John opened his mouth and said, very solemnly, "He doesn't believe me, so he might freak out a bit.  Also, he runs a hockey YouTube channel so he knows all your stats and will probably recite them at you.  Also, he talks a lot and will probably want a selfie and just," John's eyes darted away nervously, "he's my best friend, okay?"  
  
John was being shy and nervous and cute.  
  
Bane studied his face for a moment, trying to memorize it.  Bane did that sometimes, with things he liked, moments he wanted to keep.  He knew it made him come across as slow to some people, but John had never seemed to mind.  Bane wanted to keep that moment forever, of John blushing and looking away, shy and nervous and cute because he was bringing the new boyfriend around for the first time.  He was choosing to invite Bane into his life.  John didn't have a family, his friends were his family, this was probably as close to meeting the parents as Bane was likely to get.  
  
Bane couldn't help it, he pulled John close and kissed away the frown lines forming in the corners of his eyes.  "Well, if that's the case, it should be pretty easy to get him to start telling me all of your most embarrassing childhood stories.  It sounds like I have the necessary leverage."  
  
John groaned and pushed away, smiling despite himself.  "Trust me, you're not going to need leverage.  He's going to volunteer those all on his own.  Whatever built-up image you have of me, prepare for it to be shattered."  
  
Later, in the dinner, Bane could see why John had been concerned.  There was probably no single person on the entire planet with a personality more opposite to Bane's than that of JC.  The first fifteen minutes had been incredibly awkward, what with JC snorting hot coffee up through his nose and then reciting the play-by-play of every significant game Bane had been in for the past five seasons.  He had even been sure to throw in the occasional comment about John, just in case it hadn't already been clear enough that John had been party to this studious following of Bane's career.  John had tried his best to quell the verbal flood, but had been too mortified to be really effective and had mostly ended up just looking on in horror.  
  
Then their waitress had come by and JC had been forced to stop talking for three minutes while she told them the specials and took their orders and somewhere it that time it occurred to Bane that, personality aside, he and JC actually did have a lot in common.  They both loved hockey and they both loved John.  Friendships had be built on less than that.  
  
"C'mon John, get your butt in here!"  JC's voice startled Bane out of his reminiscing.  
  
"Don't get your panties in a twist!"  John shouted back from the kitchen, nonetheless rushing back to the couch and plopping himself down next to Bane with a beer and a plate of tater-tots.  "Alright, I'm ready.  Let's see this thing."  
  
JC pressed play and the screen went black.  Then, instead of dissolving into the Reel of Champion's title card and intro music, something entirely different happened.  
  
It was a shaky cam shot, probably footage from someone's cell phone.  They were obviously at a hockey game.  The camera flashed towards the ice for a second, then panned across the crowd.  There was a lot of indistinct shouting and some giggling and then the camera stopped, zooming in and auto focusing on someone a few rows back.  It was John, he was on his feet, grinning like a maniac and red in the face, his Canadians hat pushed back, high on his forehead and his dark hair sticking out from under the brim.  He looked like he was being held back by a viciously attractive woman in a skin-tight leather jacket and he was shouting.  It came through their surround sound speakers loud and very clear.  
  
"THAT'S RIGHT, SHITSTAIN!  SIT ON THAT BENCH!  THIS!  IS! HOCKEY!"  
  
A dubstep soundtrack started up and what followed appeared to be all-John Reel of Champions: John taking down E. Nigma back in the AAs.  John cold-clocking someone twice his size after they threw the Nighthawk's center into the boards.  John drinking from the opposing goalie's water bottle and almost starting a bench-clearing brawl.  John taking on half the Assassins' team during the last game of the previous year’s regular season.  John getting his nose broken.  John getting jabbed in the side, thrown into the boards, hit from behind.  A slow motion shot of John dropping his gloves.  
  
The soundtrack stopped and the screen cross-dissolved to show Bane's own face looking into the camera.  A tag at the bottom corner of the screen displayed his name, Patrick Banor, years playing for the NHL, Minnesota Wild enforcer, fourteen years, and current position as coach of the LNAH Assassins.  
  
"When we first met, I was pretty sure I was going to kill him.  He was so," on screen, Bane held up his hands.  He stared at them, as if wanting to demonstrate something, but not sure how.  "He's so small.  It's terrifying.  And he has no fear.  None."  
  
Bane recognized the footage as an interview JC had begged him to do a few months before.  JC had said something about his viewers wanting to know more about the new Nighthawks captain, but as far as Bane knew, the video had never been posted to the channel.  
  
"I put him in the hospital the first time our teams played.  He has three screws in his skull because of me.  But still, no fear.  I ran into him the next day at a coffee shop, he was all bandaged up, probably hadn't been out of surgery all of twelve hours.  He could only see out of the one eye and his ribs were taped, but he walked right up to me, ordered a coffee and a maple bar and asked to borrow the sports page and I just knew."  
  
"Knew what?"  JC's voice asked from off-camera.  
  
Bane smiled ruefully, looking up.  "That John Blake was probably the toughest sonofabitch I’d ever meet."  
  
There was a quick cut to footage of the fight, John dropping his gloves and closing in on Bane, Bane pummeling John's side, John catching Bane with a wild swing that cut open his eyebrow, and then Bane's fist in slow-motion, crushing into John's face.  
  
The video cut again, this time to John and JC, sitting across from each other, interview style.  It must have been not too long after the fight because John still looked like shit.  Bandages covered half his face and he was sporting two big black eyes.  
  
JC started them off.  "That was a brutal fight on Saturday, you think you'll be avoiding the Big Bad Bane from now on?"  
  
John laughed on screen, then shook his head, "Well, I'll probably try not to fight him again anytime soon, that guy can hit like a sledgehammer, but he's been a pretty good sport about the whole thing."  
  
"He's been a good sport?  It sounds like you have that backwards."  
  
"Yeah, no, I'm pretty sure I told him a very sub-par hockey joke when I saw him on Sunday.  He would have been well within his rights to be a dick about it, but he totally wasn't."  
  
"What was the joke?"  
  
"I think it was something like: it only takes one Minnesotan to change a tire, unless it's a blow-out and then they all show up."  
  
On screen, JC gave John a very disappointed look.  
  
"I know, right?  I bet he rescues stray animals in his spare time."  
  
The interview faded out, back to more cell phone footage.  Two figures were playing one-on-one on an outdoor rink.  The camera zoomed in, it was blurry, but definitely Bane and John.  John feinted left and tried to dart around Bane, then got hip-checked and started to fall, only to be caught with a hand on the back of his head.  It looked just about as intimate as it had felt.  There was some plausible deniability though, even if they did stand there, like that, for something like a minute longer than was completely justifiable.  
  
Or there would have been plausible deniability, had not a band of text flashed across the screen just then, reading: IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T GOTTEN THE PICTURE YET.  And then the image cut to a still photo of John, sprawled out asleep on the couch, half-falling off of it in sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt, his head cushioned in Bane's lap while Bane looked down at him with a soppy expression on his face.  Bane had to admit, it was possibly the soppiest expression ever captured on camera in the history of modern photography.  More text scrolled across the screen: BLAKE AND BANE 5EVER!!!  ONE YEAR AND COUNTING!!!!  
  
"HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!!"  JC, in real time, lept up from the couch and jumped in front of the screen, his arms spread out wide.  
  
"Umm..."  John looked to be in a minor state of shock.  
  
"Don't even, John, you start dating my sports idol and you are required, by laws of friendship, to share!  Bane and I are friends now, isn't that right Bane?  This is a totally normal, and dare I say, awesome, gesture to make for my friends."  
  
"Umm..." John was still in shock.  
  
"And," JC was, apparently, not quite finished, "I uploaded it to YouTube yesterday.  It's already got over 200,000 hits!  You are totally gonna be internet famous!"  
  
John's eyes bugged out, he looked in danger of hyperventilating.  
  
Bane sighed and pulled John over onto his lap.  "Well, this does solve that pesky problem as to how we were going to come out."  
  
Dropping his head into his hands, John let out the breath he had been holding.  "JC, did you seriously just out me and my boyfriend for our anniversary?"  
  
"Well..."  JC's enthusiasm wilted a little.  
  
"Oh My God."  John groaned.  "Just.  Fuck.  I refuse to thank you for this.  This is terrible behavior that I will not, under any circumstances encourage.  Do not do this to anyone else, ever."  He looked up again.  "I'm serious, JC, do not do this to anyone else again, ever."  
  
"Uhhh... can do."  JC was shifting his weight back and forth, looking uncertain.  
  
"That being said," Bane stood up, taking John with him, "John hates talking about his feelings and is weirdly grateful that you outed him in a way that he can choose not to acknowledge.  On a related note, thank you, that’s from me, not from John, but you might want to either go find some headphones now or leave."  He dug around in his pocket for the key to his apartment and threw it at JC, then scooped John up in his arms and started towards the bedroom.  
  
"Whow, wait, what?"  John squirmed around in protest as Bane kicked the bedroom door closed behind them and dropped him onto the bed.  
  
He looked down at John with a raised eyebrow, pulling off his shirt and crawling on the bed after him.  "Was I wrong?"  
  
John curled his lip into an angry pout, then sighed and relaxed back against the bed again, rolling his eyes.  "Did you seriously just kick my best friend out of my apartment so we can have coming-out-of-the-closet-sex?"  
  
"Was I wrong?"  Bane could be stubborn too, when he wanted a straight answer.  
  
"Ugh, you are the worst."  John groaned, scrunching up his face and pulling Bane down on top of him.  "Fine.  You were completely correct.  I love you.  I hate talking about my feelings.  JC is my best friend and knows me way too well and I should have never introduced you two because all you do is gang up on me and talk about hockey."  
  
Bane leaned down to kiss him, smiling into it a little bit.  "My two favorite things."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Home-Ice Advantage is the same as home-field advantage. It's pretty well known and documented that most teams play better on their own field/court/ice/whatever, where they have the support of all their fans and are familiar with the quirks of the environment.
> 
> What follows is some discourse about violence in hockey, feel free to skip it. I try to give some insight into both sides of the argument, but am in no way an expert.
> 
> In favor of fighting: Most concussions do not come from fighting. Most of them come from legal hits. This makes sense when you think about it, getting body-slammed into a wall by a 250lb guy in full pads going 25 mph across the ice is basically like getting into a car crash. The role of the enforcer is to basically protect the really skilled players on their teams from taking those kinds of hits over and over again. Watch an NHL game today, and then think about how hockey players used to not wear helmets, right up until the 80s. A lot of those hits, these days, would probably not be survivable without a helmet. Why are the hits so much harder now? Some people say it's because the fighting has been cracked down on (things like the instigator rule), so there aren't immediate repercussions to hitting a skilled player that hard into the boards. While also dangerous, painful and definitely much bloodier, the forces involved in bareknuckle boxing (and by extension hockey fights) are way lower. These guys aren't trying to kill each other, they're trying to put a lid on a style of play that is dangerous and difficult to regulate with just the rules of the game.
> 
> Opposed to fighting: While hesitant to call it that, many former enforcers describe PTSD symptoms when talking about their careers. It seems telling that sleeping pills and alcohol abuse is common to the point of being almost expected. I have read that the suicide rates among enforcers are much higher than they should be. Then there is the CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) to consider. From what I understand, it's basically brain damage caused by a repeated minor concussions that can only be conclusively diagnosed posthumously. While currently a heavily debated topic (you can't just go around cutting into the brain of every former athlete who passes away), there does seem to be reasonably conclusive evidence that it is very prevalent in hockey enforcers, as well as boxers and football players. It seems telling that the doctors are all saying it's a huge problem and that causes devastating damage to the brain while the CTE doubters tend to be... well... the NHL and NFL.
> 
> I have no idea what the answer to any of this is. Personally, I think a major contributing factor is the fact that there is more money in hockey now than there ever was. There are plenty of full-contact sports out there, and many talented athletes who play those sports but when millions of dollars are on the line, you start to see coaches telling 12-year-old prospects they need to be more aggressive, hit harder, fight more, if they want to keep playing. As I said, I don't really have a solution.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! Come find me on Tumblr [harlanhardway](http://harlanhardway.tumbr.com)!!
> 
> Also, there is now a [Pinterest Board](https://www.pinterest.de/harlanhardway/five-for-fighting/) too :)))
> 
> Thanks for reading, all your comments and kudos are 100% appreciated, I love hearing from people!!


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